Vitruvius on Architecture

By Professor Thomas Gordon Smith

Approximately 2,025 years ago, an aged Roman architect named Vitruvius wrote down on 10 scrolls everything he knew about architecture. He presented this work, known today as "Ten Books on Architecture," to Emperor Augustus in the hope of changing what he perceived as a rampant lack of professionalism and educational rigor in the practice of architecture. The "Ten Books," the most comprehensive architectural book written in antiquity and the only such work to survive, is a seminal volume in Western culture and continues to be an important resource. In Vitruvius on Architecture, Prof. Thomas Gordon Smith presents not only a new translation of the five books most relevant to contemporary architecture but also new drawings and watercolors that illustrate, for the first time since ancient days, Vitruvis's methods of proportion and composition. Prof. Smith re-created these finely detailed illustrations directly from the text. Also included are many photographs of historic architecture from Greece, Italy, Turkey and throughout the Mediterranean region.