Ten Books on Architecture

I've just finished working on Version 2 of the Ten Books on Architecture.  I had received an enquiry from The Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York as they were interested in acquiring the piece for their Artists Books collection.  I made the original piece in 2006 for the Noosa Books tenth anniversary exhibition and it had sold there, and I had never made the intended extra two versions.  However, I had all the texts and images on my computer, and notes on sizes and how I made the books in my notebook, so I offered to make Version 2 for them.   I think it may be a good idea to work on Version 3 while it is still fresh in my mind!

The Roman, Vitruvius, wrote the first 'ten books on architecture' called De Architettura around 40 BC and then in the Renaissance, Alberti was influenced by Roman architecture and wrote the second ten books on architecture, which he called De re aedificatoria in 1452.   My ten books on architecture references these two works and uses architecture as an analogy for building a book structure and expresses the essence of the work of ten different architects or works of architecture.

I've decided to post about the making of the individual books in this piece as I use a lot of adapted structures and various techniques. I won't necessarily follow the order of the books in the bookwork, as I will talk about similar pieces together, but I will start with Book 1 which is Vitruvius.

The Vitruvius book is adapted from the The Roman Alphabet book which I made in 1993.  This concertina book opened out like the frieze on a Roman temple with the cutout embossed letters creating the relief sculpture.

With Vitruvius, I again painted Arches WC 200 gsm paper with watered down Sumi ink to create a marble like effect, which was made into a concertina book.

I made an embossing plate of a simple Doric column from mat board, which I then hand-embossed a little inside the edge of each outer fold.

I then cut the folds and cut out around each column.

The back page contains text relating to the essential elements of architecture according to Vitruvius - Utilitas (Function), Firmitas (Structure) and Venustas (Design and Beauty).  The book resembles a Roman temple when standing opened.

In the next post I will talk about the Alberti book which is another concertina type structure.