On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2025, KoozArch is proud to partner with the fashion brand MSGM and Berlin-based bookshop, do you read me? to host LESS NOISE. Amidst the frenzy, LESS NOISE carves out a space for reflection, focusing on the potency of publishing, through pivotal projects and intersectional conversations with designers, publishers, authors and editors who are redefining the field. Three conversations — under the titles Breaking Ground, The Laws of Attraction and Publish and Be Damned — will also be available as an audio series. In line with KoozArch’s ambition of making inspirational content accessible, we are delighted to share a series of edited excerpts from selected and critical publications.
Reproduced from the publication accompanying cover me softly — last year’s Beta Architecture Biennale — this essay on the ten books of Vitruvius illuminates, with astonishing clarity, the sheer liberty and influence of copying, and the creative potential therein.
[Eds.] Everything we imagine as invention carries an echo of a precedent. Surely all of us have experienced that Damascene moment in which we realise that a song to which were devoted in a current incarnation has been sung before; was in fact voiced by another, seemingly alien voice, in a context unfamiliar to that which we had come to think of as our own.
The extraordinary 2024 edition of Timiișoara’s Beta Architecture Biennale — curated by Oana Stănescu with Chase Galis and Simina Marin and titled cover me softly — focussed on celebrating the notion of the cover both as emancipatory opportunity and irreverent shelter. Under cover, as demonstrated by the exhibition’s carnivalesque curation — we may improvise, finding new ways to interact, reflect and resonate with each other. Playful instigation, rather than the provision of solutions, was the order here; relieved from the exposure and burden of originality, the processes of adaptation and interpretation aligned with freedom, joy and co-creation.
Publications are charged with the job of distilling the essence of passing moments; the book that emerged from cover me softly is no exception. Co-edited by Oana Stănescu, Chase Galis and Something Fantastic, it is a pint-sized panoply of meditations on the cover; a kaleidoscopic appraisal of copies, fakes, plagiarisms, all recognised as the process of cumulative, iterative and imitative creativity. Among these, the following essay on the ten books of Vitruvius — arguably, the original architectural thinker — illustrates with astonishing clarity (also in its exuberant, illuminating footnotes) the sheer liberty and influence of copying, and the creative potential therein. We are indebted to the team behind cover me softly for allowing us to reproduce this contribution, authored by Chase Galis, Sonia Sobrino Ralston, and Jonah Coe-Scharff, shared to accompany Less Noise, a series of conversations taking place during Milan Design Week 2025.
Pointing Fingers and a Helping Hand, by Chase Galis, Sonia Sobrino Ralston, Jonah Coe-Scharff
Walther Hermann Ryff was a surgeon. He lived and worked between the cities of Strasbourg, Frankfurt am Main, Mainz, and eventually Nuremberg, where it is believed he died in the middle of the sixteenth century.1 Despite his training in the medical sciences, Ryff’s life’s work was not restricted to the cutting and suturing of bodies but also books, the latter of the two responsible for his enduring legacy. In one of his best-surviving publication endeavours, Ryff set out to make a new edition of De architectura, the only existing architectural treatise from European antiquity, authored by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio in the late first century BC. Ryff’s resulting volume, published in Latin in 1543, was assembled from elements — text and image — skillfully excised from recent editions of De architectura published elsewhere, amended and bound in a manner inclined toward his intended audience. In other words, he was a plagiarist.
Situating Ryff in the context of early print culture reveals that he was only one of many (albeit ethically questionable) editors participating in a lively economy of Vitruvian editions. While manuscripts of De architectura, or what is more commonly referred to as Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture, are known to have circulated throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, an early modern “rediscovery” of the text led to its subsequent proliferation across Europe. With the help of Gutenberg’s printing press — the first of its kind to be used in the European context — fifteenth-century publishers reproduced the text in the original Latin; however, its translation into other languages would follow soon after. Ryff himself would be the first to translate the Ten Books into German in 1548, significantly broadening its potential readership beyond elite Latinate circles.
The wave of Vitruvian publishing that began in the fifteenth century has not ended. De architectura has haunted architectural theory for nearly five centuries and still serves as an anchor of the Western canon to ground theories of proportion and disciplinary coherence in Roman models. “Vitruvianism,” as this tendency has been referred to, has been kept alive principally through the willingness of editors and publishers to resurrect and print the treatise, each time bent toward the inclinations of contemporary theory, feeding it with new interpretations of the original source.2 Multiple projects going back to the eighteenth century have attempted to catalogue exhaustive lists of Vitruvian editions, but — whether in scope, chronology, or access — all have failed.3 In fact, we have lost count. And yet, when contemporary architectural theory attempts to legitimise itself as a step in the evolutionary continuum of Western thought (and it does so surprisingly often), it continues to turn to the words of Vitruvius — the discipline’s supposed only direct line to classical origins. Ironically, a text that comes to us plagiarised, recut, and covered is enlisted for its aura of preserved originality.
Examining the artifacts of Ryff’s surgical hand can help to elucidate the practice of covering Vitruvius’s Ten Books and the ways in which covering’s corollaries — annotation, reemphasis, and legitimation — have participated in the circulation and very production of architectural knowledge. From Ryff’s early modern period to our present moment, an enduring tradition of Vitruvian publishing has continuously borrowed, copied, and even stolen earlier interpretations of the original manuscript — including their translations, mistranslations, omissions, mistakes, commentary, and illustrations — and reimagined them for a contemporary audience. What we have been left with are not the words of Vitruvius as such but rather a series of often clumsy divergences — a product of covering and uncovering De architectura.
Pointing Out
While many historians have tried to pin down the origin of various elements from the many De architectura editions, Vitruvius was obsessed with tracking down the origins of architecture itself.4 His second book rehearses mythic beginnings of human society, humbly placing the advent of architecture just after that of fire. It then continues its grand narrative of architectural origins by attempting to describe the earliest of dwellings: what Renaissance and Enlightenment theorists (all covering Vitruvius to varying degrees) would later term the “primitive hut.”5 Detailed yet simultaneously vague, these Vitruvian descriptions inspired not only centuries of commentary but wide-ranging attempts at visual reinterpretation: De architectura never had been illustrated by the author’s own hand, and its visual legacy came to depend on the work of latter-day illustrators and engravers.6 An obligatory Vitruvian illustration, the primitive hut indexes versions, copies, covers — and outright oddities. In Ryff’s 1543 Latin De architectura, the hut includes a surprising appendage: just to the right of the illustration depicting this structure — to which we will later return — is suspended the unusual figure of a disembodied hand (fig. 1). Perhaps odd to us, such a hand floating on the page would have been familiar to Ryff’s sixteenth-century audience.
By that period, print publishing had thoroughly internalised the tradition of marginalia, surviving its origins in practices of the medieval manuscript. Marginalia, or annotations dispersed at the perimeter of the page, were markings left behind by medieval readers as they made their way through the text, actively working to clarify — or comment on — the book as it moved from one person to the next. From short written paragraphs elaborating on ambiguous concepts to depictions of events, marginalia littered pages with layers of voices exogenous to that of the author. In addition to text and illustrations, a series of symbols — or shorthands — were adopted into the standard practice of marginalia over the course of several centuries.7
While many historians have tried to pin down the origin of various elements from the many De architectura editions, Vitruvius was obsessed with tracking down the origins of architecture itself.
Among such symbols, the manicule stands as one of the most recognisable. These hands — ranging from the crude and cartoonish to the elaborately articulated, replete with cuffs and gloves to conceal the presumably gruesome cutoff wrist — were drawn into the margins by readers who wished to quite literally point something out for future attention (fig. 2). From the twelfth through the fifteenth century, this artistic and analytic endeavour was carried out by readers; however, the transition from manuscript to print soon after shifted the reader’s relationship to text, and with it the status of marginalia as a whole. As it became possible to disseminate works on a larger scale through print, the responsibility of clarification fell instead to the publisher, who wanted to avoid confusion across a broadened readership. In this effort, marginalia were not lost but instead adopted into print, codifying the voice of the publisher in the page’s margins. Manicules remained common until at least the eighteenth century, pointing at lines of text noted as worth receiving more scrutinous attention.8
Still, the hand in Ryff’s De architectura would have struck his reader as peculiar for several reasons. It sits squarely within the frame of print on the page and is turned instead toward the margins; it is not pointing at the text nor is it pointing at any illustration. In fact, it isn’t pointing at all. Instead, what appears to be a gloved figure is delicately pinching the upper end of a plumb line — a lead-weighted string used to rule a vertical axis. In the context of Vitruvius’s second book, this plumb line offers a graphic analogue to a strikingly ethnographic passage. Speculating about the architecture of early human communities, Vitruvius does what ethnographers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would do: turn to “primitive” peoples on the imperial periphery and extrapolate from their ways of life to reach universalising conclusions about a supposed Primitive Man. “Even to this day in foreign places people make buildings of these materials,” he writes.9 Two nations in Asia Minor construct dwellings of different kinds: the Phrygians, who live in the plains, dig shelter out of mounded earth, while the Colchians, who experience an abundance of wood, build “roofed towers — barbarian style,” constructed “upright from top to bottom.”10 It is the Colchian hut that appears in Ryff’s illustration, depicted as a log-cabin campanile, and the plumb line stands in as a graphic shorthand identifying the hut’s verticality. In this sense, the plumb line appears as a device of legitimation, not one of construction, verifying the verticality of the Colchian hut against the lead-weighted string.
Such legitimation is weighted, too, with moral overtones. After all, to be straight is to be “true.” Protestant reformers of the era had taken new interest in the Old Testament and its less-referenced tales, made readily available in vernacular translation for the first time in Martin Luther’s 1534 bible.11 In one such text, the Book of Amos, the prophet Amos describes a vision in which God explains how he will measure the morality and piousness of the Israelite kings against a plumb line. If they didn’t measure up as righteous or adequately God-fearing, his wrath — the sword — would ensue.12 In Martin Luther’s German Bible of 1534, the story describes a scene that may sound familiar: God stands atop a straight wall with a plumb line securely gripped in one hand. One might remark that straightness is (hetero)normative wherever it appears, but for both Amos’s God and the Vitruvian illustrator, the norm is literal orthogonality.
Figure 3. Frontispiece of Joachim von Sandrart, L’ Academia Todesca della architectura, scultura & pittura oder Teutsche Academie der edlen Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste (Nuremberg, 1675)
Straight, true, plumb — or, as Catherine Ingraham would put it, proper: Ryff’s marginalium intones with the voice of proto-disciplinary authority.13 By lifting the plumb line, the manicule conjures, by synecdoche, the Architect, who has been figured holding the plumb line as a representative tool of the trade in much the same way that more familiar images figure the architect with compasses or dividers.14 This was true from the fifth-century bishop Sidonius Apollinaris, who associated the “plummet with Vitruvius” in the same breath as the “rule with Archimedes” and the “plectrum [lyre or guitar pick] with Orpheus.”15 Later, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century engravers would place plumb lines in the hands of womanly personifications of Architecture or beneath portraits of Andrea Palladio, the Vitruvian architect par excellence (fig. 3).16 Vitruvius’s text may have described the Colchian and Phrygian huts with impartiality — two examples of equally “barbarian” architecture — but the manicule’s plumb line nevertheless points to architectural virtues judged worthwhile.
Pinched by a manicule, that judgment seems to come from the publisher. Yet whose hand it is exactly — he who does the heavy lifting — remains a question worth further investigation. Ryff’s 1543 De architectura was not the only sixteenth-century Vitruvian edition to illustrate the Colchian hut alongside a plumb line. This figure’s reappearance and reinterpretation offer a microcosm of a larger economy of copying, covering, and plagiarising, in which Ryff was an archetypal figure.
Sticky Fingers
Between 1538 and 1548, Walther Ryff published an impressive forty-three books, reaching a wide audience of an increasingly literate public. His topics ranged from medicine and alchemy to work in the “book of secrets” tradition — books claiming to teach the secrets of nature through sometimes-occult recipes that would reward readers with material gain.17 In the first century of the printing press, these were not uncommon pursuits, but even in an era where copying, reprinting, or addending commentaries was common practice, Ryff stood out as an “archplagiarist,” in the description of the celebrated sixteenth-century author and anatomist Andreas Vesalius.18 Ryff earned his reputation by “borrowing” from earlier works and capitalising on associations with his name and vocation. He was sometimes deemed the successor of another early modern science writer, Hieronymus Brunschwig, whose books on distillation (1500) and surgery (1497) were considered important tomes and the first to be written in vernacular German (fig. 4).19 Well, Ryff likely fueled the comparison when he lifted much of Brunschwig’s Liber de arte distillandi (1500) for his own Das new gross Distillier Büch in 1545.20
Ryff’s 1543 De architectura was itself embroiled in a tangled net of plagiarism.21 In 1521, just on the other side of the Alps, the architect Cesare Cesariano published the first Italian-vernacular translation of the Ten Books, expertly illustrated by Cesariano himself.22 The edition was one of numerous vernacular translations that would appear in the coming decades, broadening access in an attempt to forge common ground between elite humanists and a non-Latinate population of craftspeople belonging to otherwise siloed building trades.23 A quick comparison reveals the bubble-figured manicule in Ryff’s 1543 De architectura to be a crude copy of Cesariano’s original drawing (fig. 5). There, an elegantly drawn hand suspends a plumb line against the hut, just inside the woodblock’s graphic frame. The hut is nearly an exact match between Cesariano’s and Ryff’s editions, though the image is inverted — a telltale sign of Ryff’s theft. Tracing the image onto a woodcut, then pressed onto another page, would render a mirror image. At the beginning of Ryff’s De architectura, the publisher, George Messerschmidt, issues an insightful apology. The note confirms that all of the images were taken from other versions — purportedly because they were helpful to understand the words of Vitruvius.
Such an admission is then followed by a moral concession: he recognises that to steal the images was “sorrowful” and “sinful.” In total, the note reads with a sixteenth-century slant of “sorry not sorry,” gaslighting included.24 As a self-pardon — or perhaps lame attempt at citation — Messerschmidt states that he included quotation marks, avant la lettre, in the form of pairs of hands surrounding image captions similarly ripped from the pages of Cesariano, among others (fig. 6). By this addition, both publisher and editor — Messerschmidt and Ryff — turn to another manicule to flag the reader’s attention; or, in the words of Messerschmidt himself, to “beseech thy studious readers” for their forgiveness.25 Cesariano’s plumb-line-bearing hand in the 1521 Italian edition is clearly an intelligent diagrammatic tool doing some heavy lifting as a form of visual communication, ensuring the reader of the virtues of verticality, geometry, and orthogonal construction. The cuffed manicule subtly interacts with the frame, safely inside the border but overlapping its edge. It is — to misapply the classic Protestant turn of phrase — “in but not of” the Colchian scene, but it also does not stand alone as an editor’s mark. The manicule participates in an elaborate explanatory overlay alongside the woodblock print’s left-hand diagram of the hut’s frame, also subtly overlapping the border. For the book’s presumably semi-literate audience, the three elements — the frame, hut, and plumb line — work together to help better visualise the salient points of Vitruvius’s confusing text; presented is a graphic rendition of the hut with “alternating beams joined at the four corners,” with “walls of trees” made “upright from top to bottom.”26 In other texts from the period describing forms of tacit learned knowledge requiring the use of instruments, depictions of hands helped to signal the hand of the maker or skilled worker.27 Likewise, Cesariano’s manicule is no longer merely editorial but a hand at work, echoing Vitruvius’s own words: “Fabrica [construction or practice] is the constant repeated exercise of the hands.”28
Seen next to its source, Ryff’s 1543 illustration is even stranger. Though both the hut and the plumb line are mirrored, their positions are swapped, and the plumb line is lengthened for effect. Ryff’s is not a hastily copied mark but a pointing hand reasserted in the field of a white page as a publisher’s marginalium. It is there to annotate, no longer to measure.
Figure 6. Pair of hands surrounding an image description pulled from Cesare Cesariano’s 1521 Italian edition, in De architectura (Latin edition), ed. Walther Hermann Ryff (Strasbourg, 1543)
Handiwork
In 1548, five years after the publication of his Latin De architectura, Ryff edited the Vitruvius edition for which he is best known, Vitruvius Teutsch. The images were again almost all borrowed, but his translation of the text into vernacular German was decisively novel. The book is as much a compendium as a translation, including the work of prominent Italian Renaissance thinkers and Ryff’s own architectural commentary alongside the Vitruvian text. Its illustrations again lift content from Cesare Cesariano but also include figures from the likes of Sebastiano Serlio, Guillaume Philander, and Leon Battista Alberti, among others — 193 woodcuts in total, engraved by the Nuremberg-based artist Virgil Solis.29
Both the choice to translate De architectura into German and its extensive illustration point to the class politics of Ryff’s second Vitruvius. In 1547, Ryff had already published a German-language commentary to increase access to his 1543 De architectura. The 1548 Vitruvius Teutsch was a far more thoroughgoing attempt to spread architectural knowledge and theory to the masses. As Ryff would boast elsewhere, his publications were directed toward the “common man,” not scholars or “ignorant blockheads whose brains you could make into pig troughs.”30
At the time of the publication of these volumes, the Protestant Reformation was well underway — especially in the German-speaking corners of Europe in which Ryff spent his days.31 Ryff worked across Strasbourg and Nuremberg, both important centers for print and Protestantism, alongside fellow bookmakers and artisans. His printmaker, Virgil Solis, was prolific in religious as well as scientific illustration, and the social and economic politics of the Reformation undoubtedly impacted his and Ryff’s labour, approach, and thinking.32 Critical to the Martin Luther–led sects of the Reformation was the printing and distribution of Bibles in vernacular languages to support the individual study of scripture, including Luther’s own German-language Bible of 1534.33
Ryff’s method and its democratising politics were not dissimilar. He explains in his introduction that Vitruvius Teutsch is for “all artful craftsmen, work masters, stone sculptors, master builders, well-makers, workers, painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, joiners and all those who might in the future artfully use the compass and straightedge for special purpose and versatile benefit.”34 Trained as a surgeon, Ryff had no notable architectural expertise himself, but his aim to support accessible theory was aligned to the ethos of publishing vernacular books of secrets in medicine as well as Protestant books of scripture.35 As the architectural historian Paul Emmons has argued, the book’s first full-page woodcut and Ryff’s introductory statement also evidence his interest in architecture as an opportunity to explore the material realities or possibilities of geometry (fig. 7).36 The woodcut celebrates the compasses and inkwells of mathematical theory alongside the bellows and tongs of alchemy or metallurgy and surveying equipment and hammers representing the building trades. If Vitruvius’s De architectura formalised the idea that the discipline of architecture relied on multiple forms of expertise, then for Ryff, the beauty of the text, and by extension the discipline, lay in the ability of the practitioner to bring abstract theory to material fruition. A vernacular volume would place that expertise in the hands of any “industrious householder” — as Ryff called his readers — endeavouring to engage in the practice of architecture.37
Figure 7. A putto, or in this case an allegorical rendition of constrained genius, surrounded by common geometric instruments of the time, in Vitruvius Teutsch (German edition), ed. Walther Hermann Ryff (Nuremberg, 1548). Originally displayed as the frontispiece of Ryff ’s Der furnembsten, notwendigsten, der gantzen Architectur (Nuremberg, 1547/48).
The hand of the maker therefore becomes an important figure for Ryff’s oeuvre. Yet in Vitruvius Teutsch, the hand beside the Colchian hut disappears (fig. 8). The equivalent plate is otherwise a far more faithful reproduction of Cesariano’s; though still mirrored, it incorporates the wood frame and employs a similar overall composition. Yet a more naturalistic setting subtly shifts the relationship among these elements. No longer a diagrammatic overlay, the wood frame shares the same ground with the Colchian hut. The plumb line, too, has been absorbed into the scene: cast to the eaves of the hut, tied off, nary a helper in sight.
Ryff and Solis’s plate includes another scene beneath it, depicting a small village with thatched roof houses and a stacked timber building. The caption on top of the woodcut introduces the “first” Colchian hut but describes the scene below as a “truthful reproduction” of similar houses in comparable landscapes, “like one can find in Switzerland, Sweden, and Norway.” Ryff’s textual commentary goes on to describe the construction method and its benefits: it is solid, long-lasting, and warm. Following a short description of the necessity for construction in blossoming “primitive” societies, Ryff explains in great detail how the wooden primitive hut might come together in sites with abundant timber resources and directly compares wooden construction in “the Swiss mountains” — as well as in Germany and Sweden — that remain in use.38 The Colchian hut here is no longer an origin myth — or rather, the ethnographic verification of an origin myth — but has become a blueprint for reproduction in the present day. Ryff’s intended audience of “industrious householders” might learn something from Colchian woodworking. If they were to do so, their relationship to the plumb line would be rather different. In the hands of the erudite architect, the plumb line is a device of legitimation. Its role is to correct or to verify provisionally complete work; to demonstrate architectural propriety to the uninitiated, assisted by gravity itself. But for the industrious householder or skilled craftsperson, the plumb line is a tool of the trade, to be used much as a carpenter today uses a level or a mason continues to use the plumb line itself. The Colchian hut now reads as a recently finished peasant’s home, so new that its builder hasn’t yet had a chance to untie the plumb line that guided its assembly. If the architect Cesariano’s annotated plate mimed an architect’s hand performing an architect’s task — to hold up a plumb line to a building and verify that a line is true — then Ryff and Solis’s illustrated scene shows the plumb line in situ, a self-legitimating device for the autodidact.
Yet something more has happened in the hand’s elision: by vanishing, the publisher’s manicule relinquishes its capacity to comment. In Cesariano’s edition, as in Ryff’s Latin edition of 1543, the plumb-line-bearing hand carries a manicule’s overtones. It may not be pointing at the text, but it is pointing something out. When, in Vitruvius Teutsch, the plumb line is absorbed into the scene, it falls silent and ceases to remark; it becomes unremarkable. In this rendition, linearity, orthogonality, propriety — the content of the legitimation that the manicule effected — becomes part of an architectural common sense so ubiquitous it no longer requires comment.
Handing Off
Both hand and plumb line would disappear altogether in later editions of De architectura.39 Yet their appearance and evolution across Ryff’s and Cesariano’s editions begins to suggest the ways in which architectural theory and its dissemination were made and remade over a series of “covers” that subtly bent toward the contemporary ideas and political pressures that surrounded them. The figure of the hand as it appears in these editions leads us to consider the material traces that these practices of copying, covering, and publishing leave on the media of the printed page. As the literary scholar William H. Sherman observes, “The margins of Renaissance texts are littered with severed hands, frozen in gestures that cannot fail to catch the eye… They have an uncanny power to conjure up the bodies of dead writers and readers.”40
The process of attributing hands and reconstituting bodies, however, has proven to be more complicated than a simple conjuring. The material traces of the manicule seen through these editions of De architectura reveal a messy chain of confused authorships — each writing and rewriting over previous editions. There remains no publication of Vitruvius as such but instead the product of multiple coverings, polluted with many voices and many unattributed fingerprints. Since Ryff, myriad scholars, publishers, editors, translators, and amateur enthusiasts have attempted the act of piecing De architectura back together. Alas, while they are most certainly dead and lost to history, Vitruvius is very much alive.
In just 2019, Birkhäuser, an imprint of the academic publisher De Gruyter, released a new English De architectura, translated and edited by Kim Williams. It does not promise fidelity to the original Vitruvian manuscript but is instead based on yet another edition, Daniele Barbaro’s Italian translation, published in 1567 under the title I dieci libri dell’architettura di M. Vitruvio.41 This latest cover of a cover of a cover will surely not be the last. De architectura’s dubious disciplinary authority yet looms — authority that owes more to five centuries of covers than to any merit of the classical manuscript. To hold the Ten Books of Vitruvius — as to hold the plumb line — is to hold a tool for ruling architecture’s evolution. The “originary” text has been made and remade, at the hands of Ryff, of Cesariano, of Williams, and many more to come. For the reader whose hands the book falls into next, it may be worth pausing to think about these other hands — each with their own aims, each pointing in a different direction.
This essay is a reproduction of “Pointing Fingers and a Helping Hand” by Chase Galis, Sonia Sobrino Ralston and Jonah Coe-Scharff, originally published in cover me softly, edited by Oana Stanescu, Chase Galis and Something Fantastic (Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2024). It has been edited to match the style guides of Koozarch.
Bios
Jonah Coe-Scharff is a designer and educator living and working in the Boston area. He previously taught at the University of Virginia, where his research addressed the interrelated politics of housing design and zoning reform in the contemporary American city. His writing has been published in Pidgin and the New York Review of Architecture.
Chase Galis researches and writes histories of infrastructure development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, connecting the history of science and technology with studies of visual culture and environmental history. His work seeks to counter the dominance of the network as a figure in the study of infrastructure by turning to the production of heterogeneous aesthetic regimes across a system’s vast geography. Chase is currently a doctoral candidate and lecturer at ETH Zürich, jointly appointed between the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) and the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies (lus), where his dissertation builds a history of electrical infrastructure in Switzerland by following multiple co-existent cultures of artificial illumination.
Oana Stănescu completed her architectural studies în Timișoara, working internationally before establishing her studio in New York and Berlin. She is also a co-founder of the collaborative project Plus Pool in New York. Through her projects, Stănescu encourages us to rethink our relationship with the built environment and explore the possibilities of creating urban spaces that prioritise livability and sustainability.Most recently, she established the interdisciplinary Blueprints of Justice Studio at MIT in collaboration with the Stanford Legal Design Lab and Virgil Abloh. In 2023, she established and started curating the “Nonprofessionals” lecture Series at EPFL in Lausanne.
Sonia Sobrino Ralston is a designer, researcher, and educator. Currently, she is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Landscape Architecture and Art + Design at Northeastern University. Educated as a landscape architect and architect at Harvard and Princeton respectively, her projects focus on the ways that plants and information systems collide, and the broader ramifications this has socially, politically, and spatially. In 2024, she was awarded the Architectural League Prize as part of the design collective Office Party, and she served as the assistant curator for the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale.
Something Fantastic is an undisciplinary architecture practice aiming to combine a strive for novel beauty with ecological, social and political responsibility. The firm was founded 2010 by Elena Schütz, Julian Schubert and Leonard Streich and its broad outlook outlined in the 2009 manifesto “Something Fantastic” has generated a body of work encompassing all scales and a wide range of collaborations. The three partners are now directing the Space Department at Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam exploring the potentials of post-disciplinary spatial practices in the light of ecological and social crises.
Notes
1 Julian Jachmann, Die Architekturbücher des Walter Hermann Ryff: Vitruvrezeption im Kontext mathematischer Wissenschaften (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2006), 16.
2 André Tavares, Vitruvius without Text: The Biography of a Book, Gta Edition 1 (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2021), 13.
3 Tavares, 19–20.
4 Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600, OSU Press Horning Visiting Scholars Publication Series (Corvallis Oregon State University Press, 2011), 64.
5 See, for one canonical example, Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture (Paris: Duchesne, 1753).
6 The possibility of the existence of “original” illustrations for Vitruvius’s manuscript of De architectura remains hotly debated by scholars of antiquity. Sebastiano Serlio claimed in the sixteenth century that it was unlikely Vitruvius had ever included visual material, which was thereafter adopted as the dominant perspective on the topic. Recent scholarship by Mario Carpo and other architectural historians has suggested that original illustrations, if they ever had existed, would not have been nearly as descriptive as Cesare Cesariano’s or his Renaissance contemporaries but rather simple geometric line diagrams that could be copied by hand without error for future manuscripts. Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 16–22.
7 William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, 1st paperback ed., Material Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 8.
8 Sherman, 29.
9 Vitruvius, De ArchitecturaII.1.4, as translated in Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Ingrid Rowland and Thomas Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 34.
10 Vitruvius, De Architectura II.1.4, as translated in Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Ingrid Rowland and Thomas Howe, 34.
11 The Lutheran Bible was one of the first times that the Bible was made available in print in its entirety — including the Old Testament — let alone in a vernacular language. Because of the scale and the impact of the Reformation — especially in both Strasbourg and Nuremberg, where Ryff spent much of his time — stories from the Old Testament would have been newly accessible through printed editions and pamphlets spread across the region. Though these stories were not considered canonical, Martin Luther translated them for inclusion in the 1534 Bible because they were considered to be useful lessons to show the importance of God-fearing worship. This story, among many others, served as an example of the Lutherans’ rejection of the frivolous and shallow idolatry and indulgences that, in their eyes, the Catholic Church of the period espoused. To that end, at this moment and for the first time, a wide range of people would have likely been exposed to this Old Testament story detailing God’s fearsome wrath.
For more on the subject of printed matter supporting the dissemination of Lutheran texts and its role in the Reformation, see Mark U. Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation (New York: Penguin Press, 2015); and Amy Nelson Burnett, Debating the Sacraments: Print and Authority in the Early Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
12 Martin Luther, Biblia: Das ist: Die gantze Heilige Schrifft: Deudsch, New Zugericht (Wittenberg: Hans Lufft, 1545), https://archive.org /details/1545-biblia-wittenberg/, Amos 7:7-9.
13 Catherine Ingraham, Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
14 See, for instance, Giacinato Brandi’s seventeenth-century painting L’Architettura, discussed in the title essay of Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997), 187. It is no mistake that Evans chooses an image of an architect with a divider — a tool of the drafting board — rather than a plumb line — a tool of what, with some anachronism, we might term construction administration.
15 Sidonius Apollinaris, Letters, trans. O. M. Dalton (1915), IV.3.5. We owe this observation to Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural Theory, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 112.
16 Frontispiece in Joachim von Sandrart, L’Academia Todesca della architectura, scultura & pittura oder Teutsche Academie der edlen Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste (Nuremberg, 1675); Paulus Caliary, artist, and Bernard Picart, engraver, frontispiece to Giacomo Leoni, The Architecture of A. Palladio; in Four Books (London, 1715).
17 William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 101.
18 Paul Emmons, “Architectural Encounters between Material and Idea,” in The Material Imagination: Reveries on Architecture and Matter, ed. Matthew Mindrup (London: Routledge, 2015), 93.
19 José M. González-Darder, “Other Relevant European Surgeons in Trepanation over the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Trepanation, Trephining and Craniotomy: History and Stories, ed. José M. González-Darder (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019), 193. For a discussion of Brunschwig’s work and its importance as a new vernacular German text, see also Tillmann Taape, “Distilling Reliable Remedies: Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de Arte Distillandi (1500) between Alchemical Learning and Craft Practice,” Ambix 61, no. 3 (August 1, 2014): 236–56.
20 For more on Ryff and plagiarism, see Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature and Alexander Marr, “Walther Ryff, Plagiarism and Imitation in Sixteenth-Century Germany,” Print Quarterly 31 (June 1, 2014): 131–43.
21 Jachmann, 34–43.
22 Adrian Forty, “First Translation of Vitruvius’s De Architectura in Italian,” in Treasures from UCL, ed. Gillian Furlong, 1st ed. (London: UCL Press, 2015), 72.
23 Long, 17.
24 George Messerschmidt, “Typographus ad lectorem,” in Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, M. Vitruuii ... De architectura libri decem ...: nunc primum in Germania qua potuit diligentia excusi, atq[ue] hinc inde schematibus non iniucundis exornati: adiecimus etiam propter argumenti conformitatem, Sexti Iulii Frontini De aquaeductibus urbis Romae, libellum, item ex libro Nicolai Cusani De staticis experimentis, fragmentum : cum indice copiosissimo, & dispositione longe meliori, quam antea (Argentorati [Strassburg]: In officina Knoblochiana per Georgium Machaeropioeum, 1543).
25 Messerschmidt.
26 Vitruvius, De Architectura II.1.4, as translated in Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Rowland and Howe.
27 Explorations of transmitting tacit knowledge from maker to reader in this period are best covered by the work of Pamela H. Smith, including From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022) and “Making as Knowing: Craft as Natural Philosophy,” in Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, ed Pamela Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 17–48.
28 Vitruvius, De architectura, cited in Long, 63.
29 Jachmann, 34. See Jachmann’s appendix for a chart of the images’ believed provenance, 120–28.
30 Eamon, 99. We cannot thank Eamon enough for translating this hilarious quotation from Ryff.
31 Mario Carpo describes ways in which the geopolitics of the Reformation shaped the rise of print culture — and architectural print culture in particular — in northern Europe. Carpo, 8, 81ff.
32 A picture of what it was like to be an artisan, especially a printmaker, in this area during the Reformation can be found in Andreas Tacke, “Business First: Lucas Cranach and the Art Market in the Reformation,” Getty Research Journal, no. 10 (2018): 61–82, esp. 68.
33 The Reformation and its relationship to Martin Luther have been the subject of scholarship for decades if not centuries. While this short paper cannot and does not pretend to adequately cover the complexity of this moment, for a useful introduction to the period see Carlos M. N. Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); and Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). It’s also worth noting that both medicine and religion at this time, like architecture, were fields dealing with questions of materiality and the effect of immaterial forces such as Aristotelian medicine — championed at the University of Padua, where Ryff was educated — or the Christian sacrament — the topic of much intense debate in Reformation Europe. For more, see Paul Emmons, “Architectural Encounters between Idea and Material: The 1547 Frontispiece of Walther Hermann Ryff,” in Architectural Encounters (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2005), 179–85.
34 Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, Vitruvius Teutsch, trans. Walther Hermann Ryff (Nuremberg: Johan Petreius, 1548), quoted in Emmons, “Architectural Encounters between Material and Idea,” trans. Ulrike Altenmüller, 105.
35 Jachmann, 20.
36 The woodcut at the beginning of Vitruvius Teutsch is, unsurprisingly, a copy; though this time it comes from the frontispiece of an earlier work authored by Ryff himself, Der furnembsten, notwendigsten, der gantzen Architectur, published less than one year prior in 1547 or 1548. Emmons, “Architectural Encounters,” 95; and Emmons, “Architectural Encounters between Idea and Material,” 179–85.
37 Eamon, 96–105.
38 Walther Hermann Ryff, trans., Vitruvius Teutsch, nemlichen des aller namhafftigisten und hocherfarnesten, Römischen Architecti, und Kunstreichen Werck[-] oder Bawmeisters, Marci Vitruuii Pollionis, Zehen Bücher von der Architectur und künstlichem Bawen (Nuremberg: Johan Petreius, 1548), fol. LXIII, trans. Simon Lesina-Debiasi.
39 We have found the manicule and plumb line in at least one other edition, also likely copied from Cesariano: Giovanni Giocondo, ed., M. Vitruuii De architectura libri decem, summa diligentia recogniti, atque excusi. con nonnullis figuris sub hoc signo * positis, nunquam antea impraessis. Additis Iulij frontini de aqueductibus libris, proter materiae affinitatem (Lyon: Balthazard de Gabiano, 1523).
40 Sherman, Used Books, 29.
41 Vitruvius Pollio, Daniele Barbaro’s Vitruvius of 1567, ed. and trans. Kim Williams (Cham, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 2019).
