The Architecture of Learning
As architecture was dignified by humanist and mathematical treatises, it began to find a place in the world of learning. Scholars had always needed the practical art of building to provide schools, colleges, and libraries, but the broader revival of classical culture also gave them a reason to engage with the art intellectually.
When Thomas Bodley refounded Oxford’s university library at the beginning of the 17th century he not only actively encouraged donations of books but initiated a programme of building. Together with his friend and principal advisor, the mathematician and classical scholar Henry Savile, Bodley used his own money to plan the extensions that today form the Bodleian’s Schools Quadrangle. Savile continued the library project after Bodley’s death. He commissioned and perhaps even designed the Bodleian’s Tower of the Five Orders, with its arrangement of the architectural orders superimposed one above the other. Just as architectural books had become a fit subject for a university library, so the library building itself demonstrated a commitment to learning in architectural form.