Discussing Architecture and the City as a Metaphor for the Human Body : From Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, Leon Battista Alberti, Andrea Palladio to Other Renaissance Architects

Abstract

This thesis explores Vitruvius and his impact upon other Renaissance architects who compare a city to a building or a building to a city, who match the city and the building into a human body, and who develop their own works. The objective of this study is to furnish an interpretation of their theory and practice through their literature and designs. In this point of view, this article takes notice of Vitruvius’s six concepts coined from venustas and divides them into two parts: i.e. aesthetic quality (ordinatio, dispositio, and distributio) and technical activity (eurythmia, symmetria, and decor) each. This thesis indicates that Vitruvius’s successive impacts from the concepts bring about concrete design principles through proportional measurements, placing together, and hierarchic values for the former, as well as appropriate use through beautiful look, symmetrical harmony, and appropriate uses for the latter, tracking notions between a city as a house and vice versa, and either the ideas of the house or the city in the synthesis of the human body, which follows the perfect number and module based on the human body. The thesis shows that the representations of architecture and the city take place with the form of a circle and a square that express the religious belief and the cosmos, substantiating the connection between the proportions of the human body and numbers, and ultimately satisfying a concept of centrality, which is slowly extended to the enclosed plaza at the urban level from chambers, atrium, and corridors at the residence level.