Post by Filippo Lo Presti

Alberti, though operating within the Vitruvian legacy, adopts the circle as a primary figure, elevating it to the role of generative principle for architectural order. Alongside it, he introduces five regular polygons and three canonical rectangles, from which he derives a series of radial geometric appendages, always oriented toward the center, as if the plan were an organism expanding through a motion of harmonic irradiation.Yet the central plan remains a rarity in the classical world: the surviving examples are few and belong to the most ancient centuries of antiquity. The standard form of the Greek‑Roman temple is the rectangular plan, with cella and pronaos arranged along a longitudinal axis. Only in the Renaissance, when antiquity is examined as a symbolic repertoire as well as a technical one, do polygonal constructions such as Santo Stefano Rotondo or the decagonal structure known as Minerva Medica reappear as references, invoked as evidence of an alternative genealogy.Vitruvius, in the third book, does not include circular temples among the canonical classes; he mentions them only in the fourth, almost as a marginal addition, a sign of a minor and unsystematized tradition. Alberti, by contrast, like many theorists of the fifteenth century, conceives the ideal church as an emanation of the cosmic absolute, a perfect form that presents itself as the visible manifestation of divine harmony according to Neoplatonic principles.Nevertheless, despite the symbolic power of the circle, central‑plan churches enjoyed limited success: Christianity was not willing to abandon its liturgical tradition, deeply rooted in the directionality of the nave and in the processional logic of the longitudinal axis. The circular form thus remained an idealized construct closer to cosmological speculation than to actual building practice ... Design of New Words The Ideal Vitruvian Schemes Filippo Lo Presti 1989 https://lnkd.in/ggkWCNi7