The Ten Books of Architecture : The 1755 Leoni Edition

Rating:
Summary: A Classic with in a Classic font
Review: The author of this book is often cited as the ideal of a Renaissance man, an architect, writer, musician, painter and by some accounts an amazing athlete. This book is based upon the Leone edition, a 1755 English translation of Alberti's original work from the 1400's. Alberta has a very modern succinct style. The chapters include many subchapters to help organize the information. He covers all the aspects of architecture and construction from laying the foundations to the wood joinery in the rafters, to adding the classical facade. He reduces classical design to a series of rules, and proportions, most of which are still followed today when a classical facade is desired. Alberti wrote with one foot in the modern world and one foot in the Renaissance world. He still respects some of the superstitions of his time, but all in all it is a dry book? I would not recommend this book to anybody unless they have a strong desire to learn about classical or Renaissance architecture. The Leone edition also includes many very good plates of his drawings. These drawing are incredible for their time period and more informative than the majority of pictures in most modern architectural books. I became interested in this book because of the plates portraying the construction of construction crane, but the font ruined the book for me. The publisher kept to the original 1755 font style. I'm sure there is some value to this, but it cut the readability factor in half. What could have been an enjoyable book was reduced to slogging through paragraph by paragraph, so (lector caveat) reader bewares?