About this book

The Textbook of Architecture collects the rules of building, as the old treatises state them and as surviving buildings show them, in one illustrated book. Its illustrations are 3D models worked out by a program from those rules.

Who made it

The Textbook of Architecture is written and edited by Chris Paton, who also made its models, drawings, towns and city explorers.

How to cite it

Chris Paton, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com (accessed date). Each chapter, rule and guide has its own address, and the foot of the page gives the citation for it. Passages of the full texts can be cited to the section: /read/vitruvius/3/3#s11 is Vitruvius III.3.11.

Using it

The text, drawings and models of the book are licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may share and adapt them for any non-commercial purpose, with credit to The Textbook of Architecture by Chris Paton and a link to the page. Any model can be shown on another site: the </> button on a figure gives the code to paste. The treatises reproduced in full are in the public domain and stay so; each says where its text comes from. Teachers will find more on using the book in teaching.

How the figures are made

No figure in this book is a scanned drawing or a hand-made model. Each is produced by a small program, a generator, that reads a rule from the knowledge base and builds the geometry from it. The Doric column is not drawn: it is computed from its height in diameters, the diminution of its shaft, the entasis curve of Vignola’s method, and the heights of its base, capital and entablature. Change the authority from Vignola to Palladio and the column is rebuilt by Palladio’s numbers.

The engraving style imitates the woodcuts and copperplates of the printed treatises: surfaces are shaded with cross-hatching whose density follows the light, and every edge is inked. Switch to colour to see the model lit like a building, or to blueprint to see it drawn white on blue. (The towns open in colour; the switch at the top of a town sets how towns are drawn.)

The knowledge base

At present the book holds 617 rules, 60 styles, 153 treatises, 607 glossary terms, 35 chapters and 275 model generators. The knowledge base is ordinary structured data: each rule records its statement, its formula where there is one, the treatise and passage it comes from, the styles it belongs to, and the model that illustrates it. A rule added there appears on its style’s page, its source’s page, the list of rules and in the search.

The texts

Where a book is in the public domain and its text can be checked, the library reproduces it in full. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture is given in Morris Hicky Morgan’s translation of 1914, from Project Gutenberg’s transcription, with models beside the passages they illustrate. Palladio’s Four Books in Isaac Ware’s translation of 1738, the first five books of Serlio in Robert Peake’s English of 1611, Ruskin’s Seven Lamps, the plate books of Mauch and Stratton and four books on the English and American house are also there in full, each with a note on where its text comes from. The other treatises are described in our own words.

What is known and what is reconstructed

The models are of two kinds. Some reconstruct a particular building, such as the Parthenon or the Pantheon, from its published measurements, and say where a part is restored. Most are composites built from the rules described, such as a Doric temple, a Gothic bay or a Victorian house, which show what the rules produce rather than any one building. The towns are plausible settlements laid out by their period’s rules, not maps of real places. In the Grand Tour’s cities, each landmark says whether it still stands and whether its reconstruction rests on a survey, on documents or on conjecture; the ordinary houses and streets around them are a fill based on the period’s rules and archaeology.

The book is not the first to set the treatises in three dimensions. Robert Chitham’s The Classical Orders of Architecture drew the orders of seven authorities to a common scale; researchers have built a digital edition of Palladio’s Quattro libri with a 3D model of his orders and parametric models of Palladio’s and Vignola’s rules (surveyed in the Nexus Network Journal, 2023), 3D-printed models of Vignola’s orders for teaching (SCIRES-IT), and Mario Taddei’s 2025 study of Vignola with 3D reconstructions. What this book adds is the reading and the models together, free, for any reader with a browser.

A note on numbers

Treatise writers disagree, contradict themselves, and write for draughtsmen rather than computers. The proportions here are rounded from the texts and from the standard comparative tables; where an author is silent, the model uses an editorial value and says so. Measured buildings such as the Parthenon and the Pantheon are given to the precision that matters for understanding them, not for building them.

Counting visitors

To learn which parts of the book are read and how, the site counts its visits itself, with no third party: the pages opened and the time spent on them, whether a figure was handled, searches, and in the Grand Tour which cities, tours and places are visited, along with the kind of device, the country and the referring site. It sets no cookies and stores no IP addresses or identifiers of any kind, and browsers that ask not to be tracked (Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control) are not counted at all.