According to the popular cliché, in the oldest surviving treatise on the subject, De Architectura, by Vitruvius, in the century BC. C., it is said that architecture rests on three principles: Beauty (Venustas), Firmness (Firmitas) and Utility (Utilitas). Architecture can be defined as a balance between these three elements, without overtaking any of the others. It would make no sense to try to understand a work of architecture without accepting these three aspects.
However, it is enough to read the treaty to realize that Vitruvius demanded these characteristics for some very particular public buildings. In fact, when Vitruvius dares to attempt an analysis of the art he writes about, he proposes understanding architecture as composed of four elements: architectural order (relation of each part to its use), layout ("the species of layout [...] are the layout in plan "Plan (architecture)"), in elevation and in perspective"), proportion ("uniform agreement between the entire work and its members") and distribution (in Greek οἰκονομία, oikonomia, consists "in the proper and best possible use of materials and land, and in seeking the lowest cost of the work achieved in a rational and considered way"). His doubts in this regard are quite intense, since four pages later he divides architecture into three parts: construction, gnomic and mechanics. However interesting and suggestive it may be, it must not be forgotten that this treatise is the only classical treatise that has come down to us, and the probability of it being the best of its time is small.
The history of the various versions of Vitruvius' treatise well summarizes the conflict when it comes to defining architecture. In 1674 Claude Perrault, a physiologist specialized in cadaver dissection and a good draftsman, published his abridged translation of Vitruvius's treatise, which was completely reorganized. Perrault's summary is the means by which Vitruvius became known and which since then influenced the treatises and theories of the following centuries. In that summary in which the Vitruvian triad is going to see the light.
In general, the most renowned architects of the century, among whom we can mention Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Alvar Aalto, Luis Barragán, Tadao Andō, Richard Meier, César Pelli or Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, have given their craft a different definition, focusing its purpose differently. William Morris, founder of Arts and Crafts, gave the following definition:
Or, considering the opinion of the architect-historian Bruno Zevi:
The substantial difference between Perrault's version and the previous ones lies, according to José Luis González Moreno-Navarro"), in that Perrault distorts "the synthetic character of architecture into a strictly analytical vision fragmented into three autonomous branches [which] is a consequence of his mental structure [...] formed throughout a life dedicated to the analysis of living organisms, which evidently at no time recomposed and gave life again." On the contrary, according to Vitruvius:
In the academic field, the architectural production process, or project, involves sensitivity as a means of trimming the different associated disciplines, and even though in past times extensive treatises were written, today the legal and the technical dictate the rules, but not the methods. Architecture is then - from the contemporary and supported by new technological resources - an exercise in which order, synthesis, semiology, matter are effectively involved, but even more important than that, it is a creative, innovative, unprecedented work, as long as architecture produced from the real estate industry is excluded.
The importance of architecture in the century has been enormous, since its exercise was responsible for no less than a third of the materials carried by humanity in that period.[11].
During this period, there has not only been a large increase in population, with its corresponding building needs (especially housing), but also important movements of populations, from rural to urban areas and, after the Cold War, from poor countries to rich countries. Migratory movements have meant not only an increase in demand for new buildings in urban areas, but also the abandonment of built heritage that, in many cases, has been permanently lost.
This constant change in the needs and uses associated with buildings explains another of the characteristics of modern Architecture. This constant rethinking of concepts has developed different and numerous architectural styles with the desire to provide an answer to this question; In the century, neoclassical orthodoxy was abandoned in favor of a stylistic eclecticism of a historicist nature, giving rise to neo-Gothic, neo-Romanesque, neo-Mudejar... Only with the arrival of the century did truly original styles emerge, such as Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau "Modernism (art)"), Modernism "Modernism (art)"), Bauhaus, International Style, Post-Modernism, etc.