• Journal of architectural history
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.55-63
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• 2014

This paper discusses Leon Battista Alberti's vision of the paradigmatic city. In his De re aedificatoria, Alberti proposes how the architecture of both individual buildings and cities should be ordered and embellished. Borrowing ideas from the ancient writers on one hand, and reflecting on actual urban reality on the other, Alberti proposes an ideal city where the sacred and the secular come together in hierarchical harmony, beautified under the principle of ornament. In Book VIII, dealing with secular public works of architecture, he writes about the composition of a new humanist city that transcends actual reality. Ornament, a central idea of his aesthetics, supports his conception of the paradigmatic city.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.9
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• pp.195-215
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• 2010

Alberti's De re aedificatoria is the earliest case in the history of Italian Renaissance architectural treatises dealing with recovery of antiquity through textual and archaeological pursuits. The key source of the Renaissance theoreticians was Vitruvius' De architectura. However, Alberti was keenly aware of inaccuracy and Hellenization of Latinity in this classical text, and tried to compensate them in his own treatise. Furthermore he claimed a reformed discipline of the architects as well as the patrons, and prescribed how future buildings and cities should be built, based on the proper authority of ancient architecture in proper and intelligible Latin. Such an adaptation of classical usage in order to reestablish a modern norm preceded in his earlier work Momus, a satire on the contemporary Italian society of his own by following the model of Lucian. Alberti's suggestion of proper government in Momus's phrase was expanded in De re aedificatoria, for he consider the buildings are subject to the rules of morality and public interests. He proclaimed that the nature of beauty is the reasoned harmony of every part within a body, and architectural beauty also lies on the harmonized arrangement of all the elements within an individual building and of all individual buildings and facilities within a city. For the architects to execute this task, he formulated the concept of lineanenta, the form derived from the mind in order to prescribe the proper place, numbers, scale, and orders for whole building structure. It is the future oriented city-plans and building designs to serve the public interest and the good of all the individual citizens who make up the City-State that Alberti pursued in his treatise.

• Journal of architectural history
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.7-18
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• 2003

The purpose of this study is to analyze the plan of central area in Pienza town. The nucleus of the plan was the principal square with the surrounding buildings - Cathedral, Piccolomini, Episcopal and Communal palace, focused attention on the first city plan of the Renaissance. The results of study are as follow: 1. The plan of central area in Pienza town is formed by relation with each other, in which theory including the "De re aedificatoria" of Alberti and practical plan of Pienza were united. 2. Though the plan of Pienza is not total city planning for new function and system, it has a many influence for city planning, square type and building disposition, through new project method as a result of prospective at central area in Pienza town 3. The square plan is formed of centripetal role to integrate with harmony the partial units of each other from diverse elements in scale, function, style and type of buildings, in which it can characteristics of the beginning of Renaissance. 4. Not only composition of plan, elevation and section of the Cathedral, Piccolomini and Episcopal palace, but composition of opennings are formed of proportional system of 1:1, 1:${\surd}$2, 1:2 etc.. And such proportional systems is composed of relation with each other in harmony, deciding width, length and height from among part and part, whole and part for spatial and formal composition.