The Ten Books on Architecture

About the book

The architect imagined by Vitruvius needs much more than an ability to draw a handsome building. This treatise connects design to materials, site, proportion, health, water, machinery, and the many kinds of knowledge required to judge how a structure will function. Temples, public buildings, houses, and engineering devices appear within a common inquiry into sound construction and appropriate form. Explanations move between practical detail, inherited examples, and arguments about the architect's education. The 1914 English edition credits Morris Hicky Morgan's translation, while its preface explains that the final portion was completed after his death. Readers encounter an ancient technical worldview with its own assumptions and procedures, as well as principles that later architectural discussion repeatedly returned to and reinterpreted.

• Design and proportion
• Craft and knowledge
• Buildings and public life

Why read it

Its wide definition of architectural knowledge connects apparently separate questions of beauty, engineering, environment, and use.

1914 English edition of Morris Hicky Morgan's translation, completed after his death