Seminario Vincenzo Scamozzi's Plausible Pasts, or: Heritage as Method

The lecture reintroduces Scamozzi’s engagement with Ptolemy’s tripartite division —cosmography, geography, and chorography—as a scale-model for architectonic thinking. Cosmography names the horizon of universal order; geography organises regional relations; chorography addresses the singularity of a site.
Scamozzi’s Rome operates within this triad: not a stable origin, but a medium that allows architecture to traverse scales —linking universal speculations to local dispositions, and returning the local to the abstraction of theory.
Two mirrored attitudes toward antiquity make this visible. The first is exemplified by his chorographic reconstruction of the Baths of Diocletian, where drawing functions as a speculative restitution of a lost whole: a heritage-making act that stabilises the past in order to make it operative as a spatial reference. The second emerges in his reinvention of Pliny the Younger’s Laurentian Villa, a building known only through text. Here Scamozzi abandons archaeological fidelity and through the means of architectonic rationality draws a plausible configuration, turning literary description into a spatial thesis that can guide further designs.
In the tension between restitution and invention, the lecture argues, Scamozzi reframes heritage as a theory of place grounded in plausibility rather than certainty. Rome becomes not a single recoverable origin but a repertoire of plausible inventions. Through design, Scamozzi does not return “the” past; he draws one of its many plausible pasts —a speculative heritage that situates architecture by proportioning between real and imaginary, and by making place legible as a proportioned relation between scales.