MISTAKING YOUR THOUGHTS FOR IDEAS: Theory and Practice, and the Currency of Architecture

Abstract

This paper examines the deht to thinking about theory and practice in contemporary architectural thought owed to its origins in ancient Greek society, audio the rhetorical manuals of ancient Rome. The play by Euripides known from doxological fragments as the Antiope is probably the oldest dramatisation oftheoiy and practice as the vita contemplativa and the vita activa. Aristotle further embodies thinking about theory and practice in his curriculum at the Lyceum in Athens. Theory and practice become an inseparable dialectical pair. The historian George Thomson argues that theory, or abstract reasoning that gave birth to Greek philosophy, was impossible without the introduction of money itself a symbolic enterprise. A significant moment in the histoiy of theory and practice is its adaptation from Greek into Latin rhetorical handbooks, as well as to treatises such as Vitruvius' De Architectura Libri Decem. or Ten Books on Architecture. For anyone trained in dialectics like Vitruvius. this opposition between theoretical or rational knowledge and practical fabrication was not seen as a diametrical opposition, but as two sides of the same coin. The use of dialectical pairs was common in the teaching of rhetoric, and the pair ‘theory and practice’ or ‘reasoning and practice.’ was probably used as a standard theme for the declamation of theses, similar to the use of communes loci, or commonplaces, in rhetorical argument. The place of theory and practice in rhetorical treatises, as in Book II of Quintilian's Institutio oratoria. was a source for their historical use as an architectural commonplace. In our own time theoiy tends to be presented as part of one's interior self, but in the treatises theory is more a socially defined expectation, or an ethical obligation characteristic of virtue: virtue itself is an interior possession. An exception may be where theory is couched in terms of a recovery from memory, an anamnesis, as in a recovery of the origins of something. For Vitruvius. to be a good architect was to be a person possessing virtue, in particular measuring practice against ratiocinatio. Someone who has no experience of fabrica. for example, and “who placed their trust entirely in theory and writings seem to have chased a shadow, not something real” (Ten Books 1.2).1 Without practice, the architect is nothing but hot air. for even a musician plays an instrument so that their “ears will delight in song” (Ten Books 1.15) The paper concludes with theory and practice as a murderous pair in the Antiope.