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Having been practising now for a year, I realise nursing in the real world can be a tough proposition.

In relating stories about origins that recall an idealized ‘Primitive’ condition, Vitruvius seeks legitimacy for judgement about architecture. At issue is the problem of authority, and Vitruvius is anxious about authority, and about order. Vitruvius' audience for his story of the Primitive dwelling, as for the rest of his treatise, the Ten Books on Architecture, is the emperor Octavian, introduced in the dedicatory preface as ‘imperator Caesar.’ His book to Caesar asserts a commonplace among rhetoricians, that authority is sought in a distant past, and in exemplars, useful precedents that promise a perfect work. ‘Décor,’ writes Vitruvius, ‘demands the faultless ensemble of a work composed, in accordance with precedent, of approved details. It obeys convention, which in Greek is called thematismos, or custom or nature’ (trans Granger, 1983, I.2.5). The task of the orator was to ‘demonstrate’ (demonstratio) that authority, and so for architecture, in his mythmaking and concern to demonstrate the truth of his opinions, Vitruvius establishes that the task of architecture is the representation of order.

This paper examines the deht to thinking about theory and practice in contemporary architectural thought owed to its origins in ancient Greek society, audio the rhetorical manuals of ancient Rome. The play by Euripides known from doxological fragments as the Antiope is probably the oldest dramatisation oftheoiy and practice as the vita contemplativa and the vita activa. Aristotle further embodies thinking about theory and practice in his curriculum at the Lyceum in Athens. Theory and practice become an inseparable dialectical pair. The historian George Thomson argues that theory, or abstract reasoning that gave birth to Greek philosophy, was impossible without the introduction of money itself a symbolic enterprise. A significant moment in the histoiy of theory and practice is its adaptation from Greek into Latin rhetorical handbooks, as well as to treatises such as Vitruvius' De Architectura Libri Decem. or Ten Books on Architecture. For anyone trained in dialectics like Vitruvius. this opposition between...

“Architecture depends on geometry, yet it is an art of seduction that would never upset the senses by means of reason.” 1 In the beginning of Book 6 of his Ten Books on Architecture, Vitruvius tell...

Taking a lead from the work of Hannah Arendt and from M. Christine Boyer, this paper seeks to locate the discussion concerning the virtual city in a traditional discourse concerning citizenship. In De civitate Dei, the theme of citizenship is shown to mask a metaphor for order and justice informed by right desire. This order is seen to be couched in late empire dialectics, concerning tlie agonistic state of human identity and of cities, and the necessity for sacrifice in the foundation of city order. Justice is based not in a discussion of rights but of virtue. Augustine renders the virtual city as a symbol of pilgrimage and participation.