The rule and the model Book

When it was first published in France in 1980, La Regle et le Modele was awarded the prestigious Grand prix de la critique d'architecture. In this translation of her seminal work on architecture and urbanistic theory, Francoise Choay elucidates the entwined fate of two theoretical genres. One is represented by Alberti's architectural rule book De re aedificatoria, the other by Thomas More's idealizing projection of Utopia. Choay pursues the trajectories of these two genres in order to trace the genealogy of a third, more heterogeneous discourse associated with the term urbanism.