i found it really important to analyze vitruvius as part of this exercise. to understand the rhetorics being used, it is key to understand the only individual presenting the rhetorical strategies (vitruvius) bc then u also understand his knowledge, his not-knowledge and thus how that's reflected in the writing of these architectural concepts and examples ... i consulted the book's preface from the translator, where he overviews vitruvius. i understood that he was more practical than he was academic; that his writing has issues; that he omits things; but that still the effort of writing an entire treatise about architecture is respectable, and likely sincere ... although there were passages i was interested in, i was cautions about where such interest came from. early on i liked book VI, chapter IV "the proper exposures of the different rooms" because it sounded fun to draw and speculate, but i started getting an awareness of all the assumptions and projections of contemporary attitudes that come with these rather vapid, not-thought-out enough interests ... i also liked book vi, chapter viii "on foundations and substructures" and i analyzed it for how it provides general discussions on beams structurally behave, as well as arches ... that was interesting but i think i was just projecting how arches are in our perception a key part of identifying classical architecture and trying to link it to somehow culminating in a pretty formal, not-too-naturalist orthogonal/elevation drawing which was a statement that itself came with a lot of assumptions that may not have reflected enough deduction/engagement with the text and its context ... book X was also interesting because its introduction reflects a reality of architecture, one still present today: money affecting projects, costs going way overbudget, and architects who can vs can't manage keeping things within budget. still this didn't seem to fit too much as something to be illustrated for the assignment ... eventually i started thinking more in concentration, specifically with consideration as to vitruvius and his knowledge and intentions. i thought: i was taking a lot of caution, because history has changed; architecture has to have changed from 30-20BC to now. inevitably there HAVE to be things vitruvius describes that don't weld with architecture today. or even ignoring those more obvious contemporary changes, we have to consider that vitruvius had limits to his knowledge back then. this is something that we especially think of when he look at what little we know of him; we only know of one project to his name (and this book where he mentions that one project doesn't specify that much about said involvement). so i started thinking: where does vitruvius come across as most helpful and most unhelpful? where does he seemingly cover things thoroughly, where might he have assumed wht the reader might not know, where might he have omitted important information? where does he come across as knowledgeable? where does he come across as the least knowledgeable? i was just generally skeptical too because, yes, vitruvius was borrowing down from previous texts so the knowledge is a cultivation and not an unchecked singular invention (as he mentions he's doing in the preface to book 7) but also this is just a text written by one individual ... eventually, i reaasoned, that becomes unscientific. there was no peer-reviewing back then. this was all just him ... so i came to the conclusion that vitruvius' efforts with this treatise attempted to be rational and descriptive and prescriptive, however it is more like they came out Vitruvian BUT i was also considering the limits of my own knowledge, i too, don't know what i don't know. we as architecture students especially in these first few years of undergrad don't know all that we don't know unless we seek it out. so that made me think that in this seemingly ages-old exercise of filling in the gaps of Vitruvius, i am bound to make assumptions that a future, professioally-practicing, experienced architect me would likely find unfounded, or based on limited knowledge. in a way i almost felt frustration with this exercise because seeing it that way, i know i cant get at the truth; i'm just some kid. i can't get at the truth, i can only come to my own conclusions. ... this was another piece of the context i thought about. why is this so inviting? it's inviting enough that it's an assignment we had. and it made me think of the authority that we now place on the classical, on how we look at these marble monuments (that were probably not unfurnished but actually polychrome) and respect them and treat them as foundational. vitruvius seems to come from this — although counter to that, De architectura was written before a lot of the big imperial Roman monuments. it's just that once you forget of those slight differences, once you think about it as a layman with a mainstream perspective, it's easy to give authority to Vitruvius' text. and then you think of how the Renaissance people studied his text and you think "oh this was important". it was, and that's partly why this is inviting in a dangerous way that must be thought of if i want to even get close to unearthing something rational in engaging with this assignment. another aspect that makes this exercise inviting & so long-standing is the elephant in the room: this is the oldest surviving treatise specifically about (or really mostly about) architecture. it's not until later that you get Alberti and Palladio. before them, we fall back mostly on Vitruvius. the one long-standing piece of text, standing alone, so important and grandiose, so classical. so i was just triyng to be aware of this exercise's aspect of reconstruction, reimagination, further canonization of Vitruvius and of De architectura. ... all this thinking later, i was more thoughtfully interested in the Basilica at Fano, the one architectural project of the time that we know Vitruvius was certainly significantly involved with. ... i thought from analyzing and attemptinig to reillustrate this chapter specifically id get parts of what vitruivus knows/doesnt knkow. this is the chapter we go into with the expectation of him knowing what he's talking about. the forum and basilica chapter? well we figure he should know about basilicas. analyzing this chapter, he refers to his own project as having dignity and beauty just as much as other basilicas. thats quite cocky... he also seemingly further gasses himslef up in paragraph 10 closing out the chapter. so this gneerally led me to think, he'd likely illustrate the one project to his name in the entire treatise and he'd make sure it was a damn good illustration too .. yes, i considered the introduction of the entire treatise too (or wherever it was he says this) where he promotes the modest architect, but still i think for his one project he'd make himself look good. or maybe it wasnt as much about himself as it was the dignity and beauty of the basilica, as he himself puts it. so I started thinking of potential illustruations of the basílica at fano that could serve to portray them and this also vitruvius with dignity and besuty ... i sketched ideas and eventually arrived at a central interior perspective of the basílica. it has a self centered quality to draw from such an angle especially if framed centrally; even, I dared decide, to such a point it overpowers the text. I settled on that composición of the sheet to drive my point home. thus this sheet (and the other one) arent intending to hyperspecifically recreate what the original Vitruvian manuscript mightve accuratrly looked like but rather reflecting on De architectura as a canon text affected by and reinterpreted by time … with illustrations that DO try to approximate using modern reasoning. while deciding on composition i also decided to do what those who rediscovered De architevruea in the 1400s likely had to do: manually analyze and deduce and vidualize the text. Specifically doing so in trying to reconstruct the basílica at fano. i recalled what we have seen in the course about other basilicas to get a base idea and then i started drawing using sentence by sentence. made me think about the assumptions i was making while sketching since theres things vitruvius doesnt mention. for instance, i assumed the columns of the basilica are Ionic just to make some sort of assumption as vitruvius never once tells us what order/s the basilica uses. (footnote: and we know from book xyz chapter/s xyz that he describes and thus knows about the classical orders) also, i assumed in my drawing the columns are round like other examples we've seen. what if they were square? also what order if at all were the pilasters? nothing about the basilica's flooring etc because he was mostly concerned with describing the general proportions and structure... i also considered if he'd show the surrounding context at all, as he DOES mention the forum that the basilica is immediately near as well as the temple of augustus but i concluded with my illustration that you can only capture so much and the focus thus remained on the basilica. perhaps though with different space configurations/extra illustrations or different depth of field more could be shown.. also generally i found the text to be presented pretty authoritatively and thus i wanted the drawing to reflect that , that was my intention.. also: as further justification for doing a perspective drawing, working only off of examp[les from within the course, the Ixion Room of the House of the Vetti in Pompeii shows that they could do it. anyway back to the drwaing ... i considered coloring it to something more polychrome but... in this aspect i fell back to the more realistic aaspects of reconstruction, where i doubt vitruvius would've thoroughly colored his illustration of the basilica on his manuscript. yes, this would've been pretty fanciful but because getting precious colors wasn't easy it's hard to gauge how easy it would've been for him to get and represent these colors. i think the original illustration, if existent, wouldve been broadly, done with a singular dark-colored thin writing material... at least primarily. so i tried to approximate that with a modern equivalent: the pen. i did, however, add pencil (shading) and ink marker (background) to allow for furnishing the drawing thoroughly. i also found it worth considering further context from vitruvius: in book vii chapter v, he complains a lot about fresco painting back then and one of his complaints is that colors put on a "brave show", one lacking artistic intent in place of brillliaint apperance, colors being oh wow shiny instead of what he perceives as the artistic merit of the ancients (this is all his words). so it made me think: perhaps even if he did have colors, perhaps watercolor, i doubt he wouldve furnished his illustration of the basilica with them, instead preferring something more formal. it could be debated at this point, too, whether this is a case of him not mentioning and thus not illustrating it, or whether it's something that the illustration would've helped to conveyed. although in this case i decided on the former, i come back to this interesting dichotomy and choose the latter for the enxt sheet. to discuss typography before discussing the next sheet: i thought of what the font mightve been when re-transcribed by 1500s/1400s scholars that rediscovered teh text and thus i looked to the examples provided in the slides of the presentation when you delivered the assignment. i used the examples as a reference to construct a font of my own this was where i had to do a lot of undoing of my own assumptoinns when writing text physically. i write, like most people, with the contemporary understanding that i write singular lines of pen/pencil with infinitely thin thickness. this is a very "secular" (?) unaffected almost generic way of writing, unstylized compared to all the old fonts of the past that have so many characteristics. ... i can't name them all but what little i do know about fonts is i knew the font/s i used should have serifs and a lot of furnishes that i'd have to try and be consistent in reproducing. i had to practice writing said imagined font as well as practicing how it'd fit on the page. although originally i wanted to write more in cursive/calligraphic, this more fanciful font instead allowed for a composition with more obvious craft and finish. to construct the main header font i also looked at the text of the Pantheon mainly. i looked at the headers of some editions of de architectura for the secondary font that is immediately below the main font in both of my sheets anyway finally moving onto the second sheet. recalling the questions i wanted to ask as i sought another passage to pick going from something more broad (an entire project, an entire building) i went onto something more specific: materials.. onto bricks is where i landed. partly becauase from reading the book 2's chapter 3, i noticed sometihhng. vitruvius describes three common brick types, including their dimensions, but he leaves out one key aspect: their thickness. this was so extremely interesting: is that not the most crucial aspect that you could leave out in discussion about bricks, their thickness? this especially invites speculation and illustration. this is where we come back to the dichotomy: if he did illustrate this specific chapter of this book, did he illustrate intending to communicate the thickness that he left out in writing, or did he genuinely just not communicate it at all? ... in my opinion many would be critical and say this was a gap in vitruvius' knowledge, BUT conversely if you explore the alternative it is a very interesting exploration of assumptions of illustrations we have now if the illustration did communicate thickness, we'd be looking at it from a perspective where illustrations really aid unnderstanding, which to my understanding wasn't as prevalent back then. it'd be strange to project this. yet, there is no true single answer because, as we know and as has invited this entire exercise, the illustrations are lost. so this could have happened! if he did illustrate the bricks to help convey them, there's even more assumptions i found myself having to undo. my first assumptions visualized basic isometric pencil drawings. that has soo much baggage to it. i realy doubted, upon inspection, that they did isometric drawings. it seemed like they'd do something indeed with perspective (see ixion room), but not isometric. i eventually settled on someting with slight distortion: two-point perspective, where things slightly warp at the botttom. then onto undoing more assumptions: how realistically if at all would these bricks be illustrated? i don't think they would've been abstract as that would be quite modern, but they wouldn't be entirely photorealistic. i eventually settled on something "naturalistic"; i am skeptical of vitruvius with architecture, yes, but there is no way he wasn't at least able to observe bricks in real life. the naturalistic approach also helped draw something detailed. i eventually decided that vitruvius would try to convey dimensions not too literally, so he wouldn't annotate which brick type is which. he wouldnt do dimension lines like we do nowadays. the bricks would just speak for themselves and you just look at them to get an idea of proportions. in this way thickness wouldve indeed been communicated but not literally.also continuing the intention of this sheet i trie dot communicate the three types of clay suggested, one for each of three types of brick described in the chapter. the framing of these drawings i also thought about: initially i was tempted to do one singular rectangle with pen, but i now think that was too much; again, under this theory we're positing that he intended to use the illustrations to help aid understanding, but not too directly like maybe we'd do now. so instead of pen, the framing is done with pencil. and it is not one singular rectangle but two, almost like a picture frame and not an abstract singular rectangle. but then for the 2nd illustrationi wanted to make (as part of continuing to explore this theory that perhaps these illustrations were indeed helpful) i did think vitruvius could've drawn something slightly more rational to illustrate the brick bond he describes. again i was tempted towards isometric drawing or generally perspective but perhaps, i thought, the most helpful way wouldve been a plan drawing. in this case i speculate with perfect outlines for the bricks, while still retaining the naturalistically depicted texture of the clay bricks. using speciically thin pencil instead of the colors for these bricks in this drawing was more about me being better at fine detail with pencil; again for the sake of craft and finish. now to address the elephant in the room with this sheet, that being the overall formatting and presentation of it, its strong diagonal against what was originally a horizontal (or vertical?) sheet of paper. again, i use this exercise to engage with the assignment which culminates in reillustrations that roughly try to approximate the original thing, but then most of the other aspects of the sheet's compositions are symbolically delivering my conclusions from engaging with De architectura, very much deconstructing it and how we perceive it. so this diagonal composition is me expressing that our contemporary assumptions are actually really weird to project to this text from forever ago. i'm trying to show that i'm exploring what i acknowledge is a pretty alternative way of understanding the text; a way in which im somehow daring to say that maybe vitruvius was actually using his illustrations to help drive home the mssage of his text. if i had presented the elements of this sheet in the most normal way (in a landscape-oriented sheet, that is) i think it would fail to use and harness the design to acknowledge a certain idiosyncracy or a certain gap that we're trying to bridge as we reconstruct these before texts with our now understandings. and yet, it's hard to fully deny this position that i end up taking with this sheet because, again, lost illustrations and thus a lost truth to speculate on. a book 11 for the 21st century should tackle digital architecture (perhaps vitruvius would complain abt what's lost in it). it should describe the contemporary ladder of the architecture profession: interns, technical designers, architects, project managers, etc. this would give one very ceonvenient and reliable resource for any student looking to get an idea of the work structure theyll be entering. it should address the substantial gaps between architecture school and architectural profession, as this is a common concern among students and beginning practitioners. in this instance it's interesting to speculate on whether a "vitruvius of now" would defend or reject (American) modern architectural education, since this is way before the first school of architecture was ever founded, much less beaux-arts & everything they influenced on modern pedagogy. something they didn't fully haave back then to tackle now, certainly: sprawl. i'd love to see a proposal on how to "solve" or generally address sprawl. i always think back to Aaron Betsky writing outright (in his book "Architecture Matters") that he genuinely does not know what to do about sprawl, but that it should be addressed. that could lead into writings regarding environmental concerns, a common aspect of contemporary architecture. now that most American homes are built quite modularly, i think that should be addressed somewhere, too. something about broad architectural modularization, its artistic consequences yet its practical conveniences. that leads me to another key concept that i wish De architectura covered more: money. Money being the key for a lot of architectural realization, especially for the most starchitectural "up-in-the-clouds" of projects. lastly, relating to money, a chapter perhaps on the "businessperson" side of being an architect, about being persuasive, about making connections, about the traveling lifestyle, etc. again this would be useful and would encapsulate the field as it now exists.