California Italian Studies

Although the history of literary authorship has been deeply studied, the concept of architect-as-author is now so thoroughly naturalized that its historical contingency is rarely grasped; nor are its origins clearly understood. Its inception can be identified, however, in the very milieu from which the auctor of letters emerged. Perhaps not surprisingly, the architectural author was invented, defined, and promoted by Leon Battista Alberti in De re aedificatoria (ca. 1450) as a displacement to architecture of the literary-humanistic invention of the living or recently deceased auctor by Dante, his commentators, and Petrarch (as opposed to the pre-trecento limitation of auctor-status to a closed list of ancient writers). Seemingly rational as described by Alberti, at once Petrarchan and Foucauldian, invoking both individual “fama” and the parameters of the “author-function,” his program of architectural production was in fact an impracticable fiction in terms of the material and procedural realities of architectural practice of his time. Nevertheless, it resonated powerfully as ideology, and eventually came to silently dominate modernity in both theory and practice as a mode of crypto-Albertianism. It appears to have entered the imaginary of the film-writer and novelist Ayn Rand, who fused it with modern American hyperindividualism in the figure of Howard Roark, architectural hero of The Fountainhead (1943; film, 1945, directed by King Vidor and starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal). Her story, despite itself, serves as another demonstration that the many problems attending architectural Albertianism have never been resolved.