The Ten Books on Architecture (De architectura) is the only major treatise on building to survive from classical antiquity, written by the Roman engineer and architect Vitruvius in the first century BC. Across ten books he sets out the principles of temple design, the orders of columns, the planning of houses, water supply, machines, and the famous triad of firmness, commodity, and delight that every structure should embody.
Rediscovered in the Renaissance, the work became the single most influential architectural text in the Western tradition, shaping Alberti, Palladio, and centuries of classical practice. Vitruvius’s ideal of human proportion inspired Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. Read it as the origin point of architectural theory, a practical handbook and a philosophy of building in one.