Statement 46

Arche (ἀρχή) (beginning – authority) + tektōn (τέκτων) (carpenter) is frequently contrasted with an iron-worker, or smith (χαλκεύς: kalkeus: worker in copper) and the stone- worker or mason (λιθολόγος, [lithologos] λαξευτής [laxeftís - sharpener]). The father of Jesus was a tektōn “Is not this the carpenter (ho tektōn) the son of Mary.” With Leon Battista Alberti, things changed. According to him:

Sed antequam ultra progrediar, explicandum mihi censeo, quemnam haberi velim architectum. Non enim tignarium adducam fabrum, quem tu summis caeterarum disciplinarum viris compares: fabri enim manus architecto pro instrumento est. Architectum ego hunc fore constituam, qui certa admirabilique ratione et via tum mente animoque diffinire tum et opere absolvere didicerit, quaecunque ex ponderum motu corporumque compactione et coagmentatione dignissimis hominum usibus bellissime commodentur 

Before I go any farther, however, I should explain exactly whom I mean by an architect; for it is no carpenter that I would have you compare to the greatest exponents of other disciplines: the carpenter is but an instrument in the hands of the architect. Him I consider the architect, who by sure and wonderful reason and method, knows how to devise both through his own mind and energy, and to realize by construction, whatever can be most beautifully fitted out for the most noble needs of man, by the movement of weights and the joining and massing of bodies. (L. B. Alberti, Preface to 10 Books on Architecture)

Today, if we accept the word ‘architecture’ - as in a Department of Architecture -  then we can do so only by beginning with the thesis that the word – as a theoretical proposition from the Renaissance to today – is self-negational. An architect is an architect only in that he/she is a not-tecton. A painter, who might want to call herself ‘a painter’ does not struggle with the dilemma of a negation within the metaphysical presupposition of the discipline. But an architect must begin any and all speculations with a type of paralysis between hand and mind,  for a person who was once a carver of table legs and is now the author of treatises seeing the carpenter not even as a human but as an ‘instrument’ . It is not correct to assume that the architect can be both like some ‘Renaissance Man’ coming both mens and manus since the word post-Alberti should be written