Using the book in teaching | The Textbook of Architecture

The book is free, needs no account and works in any modern browser, on a classroom screen or a phone. Its 243 models can be turned, cut open and changed, and any of them can be put into a course page, a slide deck or a virtual learning environment.

Putting a model in your own page

Every figure has a </> button in its toolbar. It gives a short piece of code (an iframe) to paste into a web page, a Moodle, Canvas or Google Sites page, or any editor that accepts embedded content. The model appears as it was set when you copied the code, with its credit line, and can include its sliders if you tick the box. Nothing is installed and students need no login.

What you may reuse

The book’s text, drawings and models are by Chris Paton and licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. You may copy, print, project, adapt and share them for teaching and any other non-commercial use, as long as you credit The Textbook of Architecture by Chris Paton and link to the page. Screenshots of the models are covered too. The treatises reproduced in full are in the public domain. For commercial use (a published textbook, a paid course), please ask.

The book counts its visits anonymously, sets no cookies and shows no advertising.

Ways in, by subject

Art history (AP, A-level, IB, university surveys)

The Acropolis and the Parthenon: The Classical World, with the temple’s refinements exaggerated so they can be seen, and Athens in 400 BC to fly over.
The Pantheon and Hagia Sophia: Domes, and the explorers of Rome in AD 320 and Constantinople.
Gothic cathedrals: Vaults and the Gothic chapters, with a bay that can be raised and opened.
The Renaissance in Italy: Florence in 1500, Brunelleschi, Alberti and Bramante, and Palladio.

Architecture and design

Build a Column: set the same order by Vitruvius, Serlio, Vignola, Palladio and Scamozzi and compare them, with the table of their proportions in diameters.
Design a Building: a house or a temple planned to a brief by the rules of its period, with plans, elevations and sections to print and the rules checked as you change it.
The 617 rules, each with its source, for set exercises: find the rule, then find a building that breaks it.

History, classics and geography

The Grand Tour’s five cities, with narrated flights and street-level walks; each landmark says whether it still stands and how much of it is reconstructed.
46 towns, one for each style, from a henge to a garden city, for comparing how settlements were laid out.
The Ten Books of Vitruvius in full, with models beside the passages; any section can be linked to, e.g. Vitruvius III.3.11.

Short reading

The guides answer single questions in a page or two, such as how the writers measured the orders or how to recognise a Georgian house, and suit homework or a starter.

Printing

Chapters, rules and guides print from the browser without the site’s menus and controls. The designer prints its drawings as dimensioned sheets at a stated scale, and the drawing style switch at the top of every page (ink, colour or blueprint) changes how the models look on screen and in screenshots.