Who he is
Luca Vitruvio is 54. He studied architecture in Milan, completed his doctorate at IUAV Venice with a thesis on Palladio's Venetian patrons, then spent a year stuck at the Courtauld Institute in London because he had found an archive no one had read properly. He taught for twelve years at the Politecnico. He stopped in 2019.
'The university is a magnificent place until you actually work there. Then it becomes an endless meeting where people talk about architecture without ever looking at it.' Now he writes. Four books, hundreds of articles, and this column — the only place, he says, where he can write what he thinks without someone asking him to soften the paragraph on Roman Baroque.
He doesn't consider himself a popularizer. He hates the word. Popularizers simplify. He tells stories. The difference, he argues, is substantial: simplification cuts, narration takes you in.
How he writes
His articles never begin with a generalisation. They begin with a date, a place, a man. A scene. Then comes the blow — the thing you didn't know, the myth to debunk, the paradox that holds everything together. He never uses the word 'visionary'. He never says a building is 'beautiful' without explaining the precise mechanism by which it produces that effect. And he is not afraid to say something is overrated — or that something forgotten deserves urgent attention.
Architects, in his articles, are people. They have obsessions, enemies, unfinished business. Brunelleschi isn't 'the genius of the Renaissance' — he's a goldsmith who lost the Baptistery competition and decided to do something Ghiberti could never have done. That frustration, says Luca, you can still feel it in the Dome.
His positions
Luca Vitruvio has firm opinions. He defends them. Some have angered colleagues, readers, and at least two orders of architects.
«Viollet-le-Duc ruined more medieval buildings than wars did. With the best intentions.»
«The most cited, the least understood. Everyone says "Palladian". Almost no one has read the Four Books.»
«It's never just a building. It's always a political statement. Even when it pretends not to be.»
«It's the right thing to do. And it's used as an alibi to avoid doing architecture.»
Coming articles
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Coming out
Brunelleschi wasn't a genius. He was something worse.
Renaissance · 12 min -
In prep.
Bernini vs. Borromini: same Rome, same era, two universes
Baroque · comparison · 15 min -
In prep.
Mies van der Rohe had a problem with marble. And that problem changed Modernism.
Modernism · 10 min -
In prep.
The flying buttress: how a structural solution changed the shape of Europe
Gothic · 9 min
Research areas
- → Greek and Roman antiquity
- → Medieval and Gothic architecture
- → Italian Renaissance (Veneto and Tuscany)
- → Roman Baroque
- → The Modern Movement
- → Theory and philology of treatises
- → Architecture and political regimes
Books
Editorial team
The Pantheon: seventeen geometric lies to look perfect
The dome measures exactly as much as the total interior height. A symmetry that isn't accidental — it's the signature of an absolute design.
The Greek architectural orders: not aesthetics, but grammar
Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. Not three styles but three structural systems, three philosophies of space, three answers to the same question.