Calle de Vitruvio

The name recalls Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, an architect and engineer who served Julius Caesar and Augustus in 1st-century BC Rome. From his hand came De architectura, ten books gathering all a Roman builder needed to know: war machines, aqueducts, the proportions of a temple, the way to orient a city according to the winds. It is the only architectural treatise to survive whole from Antiquity, and from it comes the idea that every good work rests on strength, usefulness and beauty. Its mark resurfaces centuries later in Leonardo’s drawing, the man set within a circle and a square. The street traces the northern edge of the Colonia de El Viso, the Rationalist ensemble that Rafael Bergamín and Luis Felipe Vivanco raised between 1933 and 1936, with houses of clean lines and garden patios. The dedication to the father of their craft accompanies that board of white villas.