Over the centuries, the role of the architect has undergone a series of significant transformations.
If we consider the etymological root of the word—derived from the Greek term meaning “chief builder” or “organizer of builders”—we can clearly see how far the profession has evolved from its original definition.
Today, the architect’s role varies across different regions of the world, each presenting distinct nuances—some more pronounced than others—regarding the responsibilities and expectations tied to the profession.
It is evident, for instance, that the high degree of specialization found within the building industry’s supply chains in the American (and more broadly, Anglo-Saxon) world contrasts sharply with the comparatively less specialized construction practices in the Mediterranean context, including Italy.
In this part of the world, the architect is still often seen as someone capable of resolving all the problems connected with the many disciplines involved in the act of building. He is expected to be a skilled designer of doors and windows—or at least to know something about them. He must also be a competent structural engineer, with a solid understanding of construction principles. And beyond that, he should possess some knowledge of history, philosophy, and more.
It is worth noting that both this holistic model and the more specialized approach seen elsewhere have their advantages and drawbacks. This is not the place to resolve such a vast and complex issue, nor to pass judgment on either tendency. Yet it is important to remember that this distinction also manifests in architectural discourse itself.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, for instance, we often see a tendency toward a streamlined, multifaceted architectural language—dynamic and formally exuberant. This stands in contrast with the more restrained, materially grounded architecture of Mediterranean Europe, where practice and theory are often more closely tied to traditions of form (when things go well). Of course, even in the Mediterranean world, there are pseudo-scientific emulators of those aerodynamic, high-tech forms—with all the technological apparatus and rhetorical figureheads they bring along.
This same contrast appears in architectural writing, both historical and contemporary. A French architectural historian, for example, may present the elements of his research as if they were orthogonal projections in the style of Gaspard Monge: orderly, systematic, arranged into plans, sections, and elevations. But when we consider the reconstructions of Charles V’s palace in Granada—attributed to Giulio Romano in the compelling analysis offered by Manfredo Tafuri in his final book—we find ourselves far from the world of Monge. Tafuri’s passage does not unfold through an analytical sequence of plans, sections, and elevations.
In short, Tafuri, unlike Monge (if we may permit the chronological paradox), seems to act like one of those Renaissance workshop artisans, abandoning the (so-called) scientific order of exposition in favor of a different, more synthetic one. This interdisciplinary approach marks one of the most fruitful evolutions in architectural thinking—a method that, historically, traces its roots back to the Annales school.
Here, the architect is no longer simply the “organizer of builders”—that is, the capitalist master commanding the various trades, much like Brunelleschi did when imposing his will on the artisans during the construction of his dome. Instead, the architect becomes, in the words of Vittorio Gregotti, an “organizer of the form of materials ordered for the purpose of dwelling.”
Gregotti speaks of culture as the construction of meaning: readings, data, and technical knowledge are indispensable—but once internalized, they become raw material for reflection. Similarly, the subjects taught at schools of architecture may remain fragmented, scattered across disciplines. It is the architect’s task to weave them together into a new synthesis, a new construction of meaning—one that forms the foundation of his own architectural vision.
The attention of both the man and the architect no longer seems to be directed toward the technical know-how of collaborators and executors, but rather toward the expertise of the organizer—the architect himself. The first consequence of this shift is political in nature. Much like the modern-day musician who remixes elements from different tracks, the contemporary architect operates freely across disciplines, without concern for “copyright”—that is, the proprietary boundaries imposed by industrial specialization.
“I am the one who decides what the design of the doors and windows will be,” the architect says, “based on the structural and spatial needs of my building. I am the one who designs even the frames, which you, industry, may then manufacture.” In this sense, “materials” refers not only to physical substances, but also to the scientific disciplines underpinning the production of architectural elements—including philosophy and history, the so-called humanities.
It is worth emphasizing that some of the most transformative ideas of the modern age have arisen from precisely such interdisciplinary fusion: mathematics, chemistry, and biology have given rise to new fields like applied biochemistry. One might even call this an institutionalized catachresis, to borrow a term from Umberto Eco—a rhetorical shift that becomes normalized and generative over time.
The significance of these divergent approaches becomes even clearer when we consider the field of medicine. Research into even the most devastating diseases could advance far more rapidly if real synergies were allowed to emerge between different research groups—unhindered by the constraints of patented techniques, which often serve the narrow interests of a particular institution or methodology, depriving the field of broader, long-term vision.
The relentless and rapid formation of new disciplines—each with its own paradigms and hyper-specialized vocabulary, increasingly sealed off from outside discourse—inevitably gives rise to shared linguistic territories that we might call “neutral zones.” Among these shared expressions, words like form, material, and order appear the most innocent—and for that very reason, the most ambiguous. These are words that can, or could, be absorbed into virtually any discipline or philosophical system.
In antiquity, at the origin of the word architect, form for Aristotle coincided with harmony. It inherently carried with it the idea of purpose—of striving toward the mesotēs, the virtuous mean. This was not an arithmetical average, but the right proportion for the person engaged in the act of inquiry. With time, experience, and examples, that “right” gradually came into focus, grounded in lived knowledge.
As the centuries passed, however, form gradually lost its intimate connection to harmony. Today, in an effort to recover that lost depth, we are compelled to qualify the term—saying, for example, “the form of ordered materials”—forgetting that form, originally, already implied order.
For Vittorio Gregotti, the treatise becomes the measure of what connects and separates intention from architectural result. His treatise, like historical thought itself, remains perpetually unfinished—but also enduring, mirroring the very principle of reality. In L’architettura del realismo critico (2004), Gregotti affirms the necessity of grounding architecture in its disciplinary foundations: a position that asserts both the critical rigor and ethical responsibility of architectural practice.
Perhaps this is close to the reading of Descartes that Heidegger proposes: the cogito ergo sum is not a being that follows from thinking—not a consequence marked by the ergo—but rather a simultaneous event: while I think, I am. The ergo is not causal but coexistent. And if this thinking turns inward—toward the self—then we might indeed say we are dealing with a contemporary understanding of the architect: one who arranges materials not only with technical knowledge but through the full presence of his own consciousness.
If this thinking is (also) perennial, though never complete, then the shifts and transformations in what we call the “happy medium” are not purely rational adjustments, but human impositions—reinterpretations made over time.
In his book Oltrepassare, Emanuele Severino writes (p. 44):
“Scientific specialization—that is, the methodical separation of a particular field of inquiry from the other dimensions of the world—is only the latest form, in the history of the West, of violence and the isolation of things, a process essentially required by their becoming-other.”
He also writes (p. 30) that…
“Mortals do not know that what they believe they are living in is the earth isolated from destiny. The one who knows this—who knows—is destiny.”
Perhaps the words we feel compelled to add to form, in an effort to restore its original meaning, are not truly attributes of form at all. Rather, they are echoes—tolls—of the same being-form: not descriptors, but repetitions of a single, perennial concept, like the ongoing ringing of a bell.
It is curious how this historical dynamic has generated an almost perfect short circuit in relation to the algorithm known as PageRank, the foundational logic behind the Google search engine. This algorithm assesses how frequently words appear near one another, whether they are capitalized, and how large their font is. Inevitably, PageRank finds a significant number of terms—especially the interdisciplinary ones mentioned earlier—to be “ambiguous,” to occur in close proximity. And because these words reinforce one another, they increasingly cluster together, distorting results ever further in a feedback loop of semantic redundancy.
But what, then, is scientific or historical research? When we accept the validity of a conjecture and seek to justify it by reference to other conjectures, we are left with (at best) two theoretical possibilities. The first is the pursuit of a fully self-consistent logical system—a dream already entertained by Cicero. The second is the idea of grasping the past entirely through a single hypothesis. Yet this second path is ultimately unreachable, since the understanding of any past event never stems from one hypothesis alone, but rather from the convergence of many. Still, when this theoretical reconstruction aligns with what we believe the past to be, it becomes our past. These are thoughts not far from those of Aulus Gellius.
This means that we enter into history personally—as characters within it. Even the first possibility, Cicero’s dream of logical totality, can bring us to this point—but in a veiled, almost emotional way. Through this, we come to understand that this coincidence between our being and the historical past is not only possible, but meaningful. To become part of history is to inhabit language. Yet, as Michel Foucault reminds us, power speaks in different languages—each with its own “copyright”—because this coincidence of being and time already exists in itself. If it is true, as Severino says, that “the one who knows is destiny,” then we are always condemned to simulate, to invent critical distances, to coin catachreses, to create new metaphors, new disciplines, new rights—simply to re-enter that which already includes us.
To confirm the different orientation of Renaissance culture, one need only consider Claudio Monteverdi—another native of Cremona—who institutionalized the remix long before the term existed. In his madrigals, the overlapping of voices is often constructed through phrases drawn from the poetry of various authors—citations stitched together in musical polyphony. And yet, no one would have ever thought to ask Monteverdi for the copyright for
‘Mentre vaga Angioletta ogn’anima gentil cantando alletta’.
Citations:
Heidegger, Nietzsche: Der europäische Nihilismus (1940), Frankfurt 1986. Heidegger starts from Protagoras, who defined man as the measure of all things.
Tafuri, Ricerca del Rinascimento, Turin 1992. English ed., Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects, New Haven 2006.
Severino, Oltrepassare, Milan 2007.
Trakl says (in the poem “Verfall..,”): “On evenings, when the bells of peace are ringing, / I watch the birds’ miraculous migration/outstretched in queues, like pilgrims to salvation, / through autumn’s clear expanses southward winging.”
