ENGLISH VERSION Charles van den Heuvel, De Huysbou: A reconstruction of an unfinished treatise on architecture, town planning and civil engineering by Simon Stevin

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION

Charles van den Heuvel
De Huysbou
A reconstruction of an unfinished treatise on architecture, town planning and civil engineering by Simon Stevin

Amsterdam, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2005

Simon Stevin (1548-1620)

[1] The book was downloaded in a pdf format from the official website of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (www.knaw.nl). 

[2] The figure of Simon Stevin (or Simone Stevino or Simon of Bruges, the city of his birth) is mentioned in encyclopaedias as that of a famous Flemish mathematician and physicist who lived across 1500 and 1600 (1548-1620). And there is no doubt that it is indeed so; for example, Stevin introduced in Europe decimal fractions, studied irrational numbers, deepened physical phenomena, discovering laws that carry his name today. Completely underestimated are however the interests that Stevin cultivated on architecture and led him to plan the publication of a treatise De Huysbou (On architecture), which unfortunately remained incomplete. Although Charles van den Heuvel points out that this is not a monograph on Simon Stevin, it must be said that his work proves to be of great interest, exactly because it allows understanding better the multi-faceted personality of this scientist, humanist, but also high-ranking official in years extremely difficult for the newly born Republic of the United Provinces. In 1581, in fact, the northern provinces of the Netherlands declared the Spanish monarchy as lapsed and proclaimed their independence, organizing themselves into a federal model at whose head was placed William I of Orange-Nassau. In 1584, William was murdered. He was succeeded by his son, Maurice of Nassau, just seventeen; with him, the republic found a strong political leadership that allowed its strengthening, thanks to shrewd political alliances with foreign powers. Simon Stevin was the private tutor of Mauritius (probably as from 1593) as well as the administrator of his private assets; but above all he played a role of counsellor, which forced him to confront himself with a number of civil and military issues (from fortification systems to daring engineering solutions to steal land from the sea or to drain swamps and make them fertile), which are regularly to be found in his writings. It is certain that Stevin wrote a lot, sometimes publishing, but more often keeping his comments in manuscript form. We know, for example – these are his own notations – that he compiled a treatise on perspective [note of the editor: that treatise appears to have been studied by Rocco Sinisgalli. See Rocco Sinisgalli: The new De Pictura by Leon Battista Alberti, p. 82] and that in his youth, exclusively for his private use, he completed a first treatise on architecture, which probably dealt with the theme of the architectural orders in the light of the Treaties of Vitruvius, Alberti and Serlio (p. 149). But the main source known to us today on the subject is constituted by his Wisconstighe Gedachtenissen (Mathematical Memoirs), published in two volumes between 1605 and 1608, within which appears a section entitled De Huysbou. It is the same author, however, to point out that many of the materials that were expected to be contained in these pages were in fact not present, because not ready at the time the printer imposed him to publish his work. Stevin promises the reader a future publication, monographically dedicated to architecture and urban planning issues. Very little, in fact, was published before his death (1620). Fortunately, however, after his death, there were those who took charge, albeit partially, to transcribe the manuscripts of Stevin: Isaac Beckman copied a part of them in his "Journael", re-discovered in 1905 and published between 1939 and 1953; Hendrick Stevin (son of Simon) published part of the materials in Materiae Politicae: Burgherlicke Stoffen (1649) and Constantin Huygens had on his turn a possibility to access the manuscripts, copying those fragments that considered of a greater importance. All this material, which came to us in a confused and sometimes contradictory way, now enables Charles van den Heuvel to present not a critical edition, but a "possible" edition of the Treaty of architecture, which Simon Stevin was never able to conclude and publish. 

The Mauritshuis Art Museum, The Hague (by Jacob van Campen)

[3] From the Introduction of the author: 

“... The discussion of Stevin’s Huysbou opens by exploring the origins of the ideas contained in the work. The four subsequent chapters examine Stevin’s notions of simmetry and order in architecture, his views on building methods, the role of water and the use of visual presentations of architecture. The sixth and seventh chapter of the commentary surveys Stevin’s contribution to architectural theory and the reputation enjoyed by Huysbou in the Low Countries and in the broader European context.

The second section of the book contains Stevin’s work on architecture and town planning. This is not a critical text in the ordinary sense. Stevin’s Huysbou was never actually published as such and the precise intentions of the author are no longer known. Nonetheless, an attempt has been made here, based on Stevin’s own notes regarding the composition of the architectural treatise and the often contradictory lists of contents drawn up by others after his death, to recreate the envisaged Huysbou as accurately as possible. This reconstruction is preceded by a discussion in three chapters of the work’s genesis, the first attempts to uncover the original form of the opus and an explanation of the framework upon which this hypothetical reconstruction is based...

The reconstruction is more than just an incomplete treatise; it is a new work in which the gaps have been filled with extracts and comments found elsewhere in Stevin’s oeuvre. This approach has been taken because the generally accepted version of Stevin’s architectural text, that published by Hendrick Stevin in Materiae Politicae in 1649, purposely deviates from the original structure, presenting Huysbou in a distorted format. In unpublished extracts from the original work, Isaac Beeckman and Constantijn Huygens revealed entirely different aspects of the book, highlighting parts otherwise ignored. These texts have been brought together here for the first time”.

The Royal Palace, Amsterdam (by Jacob van Campen)

[4] In his Geschichte der Architekturtheorie: von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Hanno-Walter Kruft devotes a chapter (the fourteenth) to the theoretical debate in Germany and the Netherlands in the sixteenth century. The result is a bleak picture. According to Kruft, "the sole German contribution [note of the editor: the judgment implicitly extends to the Netherlands] to architectural theory at this time was Durer’s treatise on fortification (1527) "(p. 213). He refers to the works of Pieter Coecke Van Aelst and Hans Vredeman de Vries, but without any particular enthusiasm (although de Vries is credited with having put on the agenda the issue of geographical-climatic categories forcing the architecture to local adaptations). Stevin is not mentioned, as opposed to what was done in 1998 by Krista de Jonge in Vitruvius, Alberti and Serlio: Architectural Treatises in the Low Countries, 1530-1620, who perceived the importance of his thinking. If Kruft had known the work of Stevin, he would have probably recalibrated his judgment. Charles van der Heuvel highlights the new elements present in De Huysbou: “Stevin was the first [note of the editor: Dutch] theorist not to attempt a reconstruction of the proportions of classical columns, dealing instead with the fundamental premises of the origin and logic of Vitruvian theory” (p. 38). And again: “Stevin was the first architectural theorist in the Low Countries to present a fundamental critique of Vitruvianism. Some commentators, like Hans Vredeman de Vries, had tried to adapt the orders to local conditions but had never cast doubt on the correctness of Vitruvians’ dimensions or their basis in nature” (p. 111). Stevin, however, advanced these doubts, basing his beliefs on the view that Vitruvius was wrong to translate and interpret the term "symmetry" that came from the ancient Greeks. Stevin believes that, when it comes to symmetry, we should not have in mind the relationship between a part and the whole ("analogous to the relative proportions of the head, nose, feet and other parts of the ideal human figure" (p. 39)), but the "parallelism" or "mirror symmetry" with respect to a central axis. It follows that all the theoretical debate on the relationship between the part and the whole in the column (which is the problem on which all Renaissance theorists had scratched their heads, starting from the axiom that the fixed proportions of classical columns originated in nature and reflected a universal ideal of beauty” (p. 40)) is simply wrong. In fact Stevin, who may have indeed studied that problem in his first architectural treatise, in De Huysbou does not dwell any more on orders. Stevin’s whole architecture, but also his town planning theory (Stevin develops an image of the ideal city, which is very different from that of the Italian Renaissance architects (see in particular pp. 47-50) is based on the concept of mirror symmetry. 

[5] It is clear that the theoretical contribution of Stevin forces a revision of any assessments of a substantial dryness of architectural thinking in the Netherlands, but also faces us with new problems. So far, it was considered in fact that the first substantial critical approach to Vitruvius was that of Claude Perrault, in his translation of De architectura first and in the Ordonnance des Cinq Espèces des Colonnes Selon la Méthode des Anciens (Ordering of five types of columns according to the antiques) later on, in essence calls into question the existence of an ideal relationship between the parts and the whole of the column, and introduces the concept of mirror symmetry. However, Perrault wrote between 1673 and 1683, i.e. at least sixty years after Stevin. It is possible - van den Heuvel says – that both Stevin and Perrault may have borrowed the concept of mirror symmetry from a passage of the De re aedificatoria, in which Leon Battista Alberti speaks on it, but without any further development after the introduction of the topic (see p. 115). However, also the hypothesis that Stevin might have influenced indirectly (in particular through Descartes and Mersenne) the thinking of Perrault is certainly remarkable and is still brought to the attention of the reader (p. 129 et seq.) 

[6] The use of language in the Treaty of Stevin would merit a separate discussion. In almost all his writings (and not just limited to those on architecture) Stevin makes use of Dutch instead of Latin. The need to speak and write in a language that can be understood by his compatriots is the reflection of a man who constantly posed himself the problem of the practical implications which his research had to make possible (with the need therefore to be understood by as many people as possible), but also a result of the fact that "he felt [note of the editor: that the Dutch language] was more suitable than Greek or Latin for explaining his ideas, since Dutch employed many more cogent, mono-syllabic words” (p. 12). The text of the Treaty is therefore presented in the original Dutch language, with English translation in the face. At the end of the volume, pages 515-517 include a glossary of architectural terms used in the treaty, with their translation in English.