Lecture 20. Printing in the Pre-Modern Era

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Mrinalini Rajagopalan


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Technologies of Movement and Communication

This lecture offers a comparison between two architectural treatises: one written in medieval China and the other in Renaissance Europe. While neither of these were the first architectural treatises of their respective languages or cultures, they were amongst the earliest to be printed and widely published thereby making them widely known to audiences within and abroad. What is being examined in this lecture then, is the particular intersection of a technology of communication (printing) and a modality of architectural knowledge (the treatise). Taken together the combination proved to be a powerful aspect by which architectural information moved from one part of the world to another. In comparing the Yingzao Fashi to the General Rules of Architecture we can detect many points of similarity. First, both books were written at a time of political tumult and social upheaval. The royal patrons of both these treatises understood that architectural standardization would provide the veneer of stability and unity in a time of great uncertainty. Second, the Yingzao Fashi and the Rules were not simply manuals written for masons or illiterate craftsmen. They were sophisticated texts that reflected the humanistic concerns of their time in 12th century China and 16th century western Europe. They brought architecture into discussion with poetry, philosophy, and science in such a way that what had previously been seen as a trade or a craft was now elevated to the level of fine art. Third: written during periods when printing technology was being used to disseminate ancient texts, the Yingzao Fashi and Rules also played a large part in creating civilizational identities across time and space. The Yingzao Fashi was printed when the written word of Buddhism and the translation of ancient Buddhist texts into vernacular languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean created a common civilizational core for medieval societies in East Asia. Architectural knowledge from the Yingzao Fashi also moved within this new community: Buddhist temples built 200 years apart in China and Japan show the same details of bracketing taken from the Yingzao Fashi. In the case of Renaissance Italy, it was classical Greece and Rome that provided the civilizational foundations for a new interconnected Europe. Architectural treatises such as Serlio’s Rules circulated amongst a new knowledge of classical philosophy and the forms of building that Serlio prescribed became the grammar of a European civilization that saw its roots in ancient Greece and classical Rome. Today, we take printed books for granted—and architectural manuals can be freely downloaded on the internet—and we seek no deeper meaning in the architectural treatises, if they can be called such, of our own times. However, the exercise of composing and then printing an architectural treatise in 12th century China or 16th century Italy was a formidable task, it was one that required its authors to dedicate much of their lives to as they synthesized and codified vast amounts of knowledge and practical information from various sources into a single source.

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