John R. Senseney’s The Art of Building in the Classical World: Vision, Craftsmanship, and Linear Perspective in Greek and Roman Architecture is a highly creative, discursive synthesis of an impressive range of thematic strands within classical architecture and philosophy. Senseney’s objective is to infer some possible theoretical bases for Greek architectural design procedures from the end of the fifth-century BCE to the first-century BCE, when the Roman architect Vitruvius wrote his Ten Books on Architecture with frequent reference to lost Greek texts. Senseney highlights developments in Greek philosophy, astronomy, and other fields that may have formed the basis of the Vitruvian concept of architectura, which differs from the modern concept of architecture by including not only building but also astronomy and mechanics. For Senseney, the practice of drafting technical diagrams and ancient theories and habits of vision play an essential role in this development.

In the introduction, Senseney notes that the Greek term idea (pl. ideai) appears in architectural and philosophical treatises. Vitruvian ideai comprise three types of architectural drawings: scale ground plans (ichnography), orthogonal elevations, and views in linear perspective (skenographia). Yet idea is also Plato’s word for intellectual concepts that are faintly reflected in but exist outside of sensory experience, comprehended only by the soul. Senseney speculates that Plato’s use of ideai may be metaphorical, relying on his reader’s familiarity with diagrams that represent larger phenomena, especially reduced-scale architectural plans that schematically represent actual buildings. As Senseney acknowledges, an enormous chronological gap separates Plato and Vitruvius, and no surviving literary source directly connects these two uses of the term. Senseney aims to tease out possible connections and developments over time by drawing on faint traces in the literary and archaeological records, aptly described as “threads spread in torn fragments blowing over and buried within a varied landscape” that he attempts to “reconnect . . . across their interstices” (25).

Chapter 1 begins by investigating whether Greek architects prior to Plato created reduced-scale ground plans in the design process. Senseney reviews scholarship on several buildings known to have underlying whole number ratios in plan and elevation, concluding that the question “must at present remain unanswered” (58). Yet he emphasizes that plans could have been used for esoteric (and archaeologically invisible), rather than pragmatic, reasons. This is the first of several major leaps intimated by Senseney in the textile metaphor quoted above. He writes, “if one allows for the possibility that ideai as architectural drawings extend back into traditions preceding Plato, one may begin to analyze Plato’s writings as reflecting traditions of the art of building” (51). The detailed analysis of numerous philosophical texts in the remainder of the chapter rests on accepting this premise. Key to this discussion is Plato’s metaphor of the universe as the product of a divine craftsman, wherein the motions of celestial bodies are compared with the diagrams of Daidalos, the quintessential Greek craftsman. Senseney stresses that through the character of Daidalos Plato makes an overt connection between diagrams and the act of making, if not the act of building per se. Further, the comparison also hints at a connection between astronomy and building as later seen in the Vitruvian notion of architectura, with the common element being the drafting of geometric diagrams to express underlying concepts.

Chapter 2 elaborates on this potential connection. The argument centers on a six-petal rosette created with a compass and straightedge and known from inscribed examples at ancient building sites. This fundamental geometric construction allows a draftsman to divide a circle into twelve (or twenty-four) equal divisions. Senseney suggests that this rosette may have served as the visual basis for several seemingly disparate phenomena, including the division of the Zodiac into twelve equal parts and the geometric underpinning of ancient Greek and Roman theaters as prescribed by Vitruvius (and visible in several excavated theaters). He then connects these radial forms first to Greek theories of vision that describe rays converging radially in the eye, and subsequently to the underlying radial framework of drawings in linear perspective (skenographia), originally invented for use in theatrical sets. With this web of associations as a backdrop, Senseney proposes the early fourth-century BCE Theater of Dionysus (and a speculative late fifth-century wooden predecessor) in Athens as possibly the first building designed via a scale drawing, arguing that the theater’s shape as a circle with radiating aisles reflects the radial concept of vision and drawing. For Senseney, such a building is unthinkable without a plan drawn with a compass and straightedge. He suggests that the nexus of visuality in the theater (etymologically the “place for seeing”), combined with strong influence from stage scenery drawn in linear perspective, spawned the concept of drafting a scale ground plan for the new theater. These are perhaps the most tenuous connections in the study, particularly because of the fundamental difference between views in linear perspective, which closely reflect human visual experience, and ground plans, which are a conceptual construct largely unrelated to human experience, as noted by Senseney himself (36–39). Speculation on how the designer of the Theater of Dionysus made that conceptual leap, which would have been useful here, is delayed until chapter 3.

During the discussion of the Theater of Dionysus, Senseney offers a new interpretation of a short satirical scene in Aristophanes’s The Birds in which an astronomer, Meton, carries drafting tools onto the stage and offers a design for a city in the form of a circle with radiating streets and a market at the center. Senseney suggests that the joke lies in the actor using the unusual new circular theater with radiating aisles as a visual aid for his city design. Since The Birds was produced in 414 BCE, this suggestion requires accepting Senseney’s proposition of a circular wooden predecessor to the earliest known circular stone theater of ca. 370 BCE. Whether that hypothesis is correct or not, this literary example would have been highly effective in the discussion of ground plans in chapter 1, since it provides solid evidence of the use of drafting tools for a type of architectural planning prior to Plato’s use of the term ideai.

Chapter 3 begins with an investigation of ancient examples of single-axis protraction—the graphic compression or extension of an architectural feature along only one of its dimensions. Senseney revisits the well-known drawing of a vertically compressed column profile incised on the wall of the temple of Apollo at Didyma and reviews proposals that single-axis protraction of a circle into a broad ellipse may be the basis for the curvature of the stylobates of some Doric temples. He adds via his own analysis that whole number ratios of distinct modular units underlie these diagrams, which suggests that the creation of optical refinements was an extension of designing via whole number ratios as discussed in chapter 1. He then attempts to trace the origins of single-axis protraction, focusing on processes using a compass and straightedge to mark the location of flutes on a column drum. Since column drums, even those in a single column, vary in size, this process was of necessity scalable, and a variation of the same six-petal rosette discussed in chapter 2 could have been used to create the canonical twenty-four flutes of an Ionic column. Senseney proposes a potential sequence for the intermediate steps between this type of full-size scalability and the development of reduced-scale drawings in plan: first came full-size scaling of individual parts, then single-axis protraction, then drawings in linear perspective, and finally reduced-scale plans. He reasserts that the final step took place in the process of designing the Theater of Dionysus in Athens, here more fully explained as “a transference of the geometric underpinning of the vertical surface of the skene [i.e., scene paintings in linear perspective] . . . now applied to the hollowed slope of the curved koilon [seating area]” (139). Yet Senseney hedges his argument, stating that “although one cannot know whether the new design of the Theater of Dionysos reflects the earliest example of ichnography in Hellenic building, from the standpoint of later theory, it is at least perhaps the earliest recognizably architectural application of the practice” in the Vitruvian sense (139; emphasis in original).

This idea is further explored in the fourth and final chapter, which starts with a discussion of two fundamental aspects of Vitruvian architectura derived from Greek sources: taxis, the underlying geometric ordering of a design via modules and ratios; and diathesis, the flexible application of this ordering to create a pleasing and appropriate overall design. These concepts are exemplified by the “Vitruvian man,” where a circle and a square guide the overall form of the human figure while integral ratios relate smaller units (head, hand, foot, etc.) to the whole. Senseney points out that discerning a circle and a square as the foundation of the human form is not a natural process, and indeed, “it is only within a culture that is to some degree focused on graphic forms created with the compass and straightedge that people would claim that such a composition is given in nature” (149; emphasis in original). This is the architectural vision posited by Senseney in Greek architecture: using the forms and habits of draftsmanship to create order in the built environment, and perceiving order in the natural world via those same forms. As a conclusion to this chapter and the book as a whole, Senseney reviews several Hellenistic temples that are generally accepted to derive from scale ground plans and pursues the influence of these and similar structures on Rome. Here, adaptation of Greek architectural practice led to the development of the forms associated with Roman imperial architecture: complexes with disparate spaces joined in a unified design and the combinations of curvi- and rectilinear forms embodied by Roman concrete, described by Senseney as “a material capable of shaping interior space all around and above according to the circular and polygonal forms of the drawing board” (172–73).

There is much to recommend in Senseney’s study beyond the schematic overview offered here, especially to those interested in ancient philosophy. A general criticism, however, is that The Art of Building in the Classical World contains two related but largely independent theses, the combination of which complicates and obscures the exposition of both. Taken on its own, the broader thesis on the theoretical basis of the Vitruvian concept of architectura is highly successful. The narrower thesis on the precise moment of invention of scale ground plans, however, is not as persuasive. Its scattered presentation undermines what may be a more compelling argument if presented systematically and disentangled from the discussion of Vitruvian architectura. Despite these faults, Senseney’s book is strongly recommended as an ambitious and provocative synthesis that should spur debate on numerous issues.