Responding to Vitruvius: On Architecture

During this assignment I also had to read Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The American Scholar," and there were many parallels between the two texts. 

According to Vitruvius, the architect must be a well-rounded person, dabbling a little in a lot of disciplines.  Because architecture is supposedly the art by which all other arts are judged, it must be the supreme art form, the culmination of many disparate parts to create a whole beautiful, functional work. In his work, Emerson says that in order to be a "whole man," a Scholar must be versed in many different areas, not highly specialized in one discipline so that the man becomes his work.  The Scholar uses books and history for inspiration (as an architect must look to precedent for inspiration), lives and learns from his own experiences (as an architect can not only copy the work of others and pass it off as his own), and thinks creatively while looking to the future (as an architect aims to create a building befitting its time that also shall stand for many ages).

The combination of these works serves to give an architect a rather large ego, as both texts insinuate that as a Renaissance Man of sorts, the Scholar and the Architect are the pinnacle of human development.  I don't necessarily agree that architecture is the art by which other arts are judged - I rather think of it as an amalgam of the various arts but not the umbrella they all fit under.  And while it is good to be a well-rounded individual so that you have a large pool of knowledge and images to pull inspiration from, it is impossible to know everything and do everything very well.  So really, the scholarly architect should be sure not to get too big for his breeches and realize that while it does take an understanding of a large array of subjects to do what he does, a mechanical engineer or a nanotechnologist can still make him feel like an idiot.