The Vitruvian Virtues of Architecture: Utilitas, Firmitas, Venustas

No more famous slogan has been invented for the essential components of architectural values than Vitruvius’s famous three of utilitas (function? commodity? utility?), firmitas (solidity? materiality?), and venustas (beauty? delight? desire?). Despite the famous attempts to fix the meaning of the three terms, it is evident that their location within the Vitruvian ‘triad’ has cast a spell over any etymological analysis. Clearly, what Vitruvius intended was a ‘unity in the face of difference’, or, alternatively, a resistant diversity in the face of imposed unity. Although this Janusian goal resembles Jacques Lacan’s equally problematic proposal for the ‘unity-in-diversity’ of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the Real as components of human subjectivity (or ‘mind’, or ‘life’ ...), no one has undertaken a comparison of Vitruvius’s triad to Lacan’s. Yet, there are some compelling reasons why this comparison should be made. First, Lacan compared the relationships of the imaginary, symbolic, and Real to the Borromeo knot, a triad of overlapping rings where the connection of any two is made by the presence of a third. Remove or cut one of the rings, and the other two fall apart. The role of the ‘third thing’ to guarantee the unity of two others, which are not commensurable on their own, suggests that the typical paradoxes that plague Vitruvius’s translators (materiality v. imagination? form v. substance?) could benefit from this ‘topological’ approach. Three considerations are needed to set up this comparison: (1) How architects make specifications — the fact that architects are restricted to a ‘symbolic’ level of communication with those who actually construct buildings is very important; (2) How architects conceive of and articulate the outcomes and accomplishments of their designs — and the dependence of these conceptions on collectively maintained fantasies about how buildings work and are used; and (3) How unsymbolizable values, such as beauty, are somehow incorporated ‘anyway’ in the process of symbolic specification and fantasized results. This last issue must be parsed into two parts, a set of problems related to the ‘extrinsic’ realities of architecture (ecology, building technologies, etc.) and ‘intrinsic’ gaps or inconsistencies that constitute the kernels of values that resist paraphrase, caption, or explanation.