Concepts
The Vitruvian Triad
vih-TROO-vee-un
Also Known As Firmness, Commodity and Delight
Design Principle
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Vitruvius's requirement that building satisfy three things at once: firmitas, utilitas, venustas, rendered in the classic English of Henry Wotton as firmness, commodity and delight. It remains the shortest complete definition of what architecture must do, and every era's arguments are at bottom arguments about the weighting of the three.
Facts
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Open Questions (1 open question)
In what year did Vitruvius formulate the firmitas, utilitas, venustas triad recorded in De architectura?
De architectura carries no internal date, and scholarly estimates for when Vitruvius composed the work span roughly 30 to 15 BC. This atlas records a formulated-year using a plain Gregorian Int column, and the house voice convention keeps BC-era dates in prose rather than forcing them into that integer field, so no defensible single year can be written there for this ancient concept.
What would resolve this A narrower scholarly consensus date for the composition of De architectura, or a dedicated atlas convention for recording circa BC dates outside the plain Int column, would let this fact be written honestly instead of left blank.
Classical scholarship, architectural historyMarcus Vitruvius Pollio, translated by Morris Hicky Morgan, The Ten Books on Architecture
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The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.