2.2 ORIGIN

2.2 Origin

The word itself derives from the Italian word disegno which means drawing, a word which was used in England during the 17th century to describe the drawings of the architect Sir Roger Pratt.25 Although there is no clear evidence on when the definition of design was first created, it was used by Leon Battista Alberti in the 15th century to explain that 'the whole art of the building consists in the design, and in the structure'.26 Giacomo Leoni, who translated Alberti' s quote in 1726, suggested that 'design/structure' was a way of describing two aspects of a single activity - architecture.27 Architecture (Latin architectura, after the Greek ἀρχιτέκτων –arkhitekton – from ἀρχι- 'chief' and τέκτων 'builder, carpenter, mason) is the mother of all the arts.28 Until the 17th century the word design mainly referred to drawings, i.e. the instructions to produce design. The word design, defined as the resulted object, started being used during the 18th century. In 1790, Immanuel Kant wrote, in the Critique of judgment, that 'in painting, sculpture, and in all the formative arts—in architecture, and horticulture, so far as they are

25 Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000),p. 136 26 Simon Varey, Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel, Volume 1, (Cambridge: The University Press, 1951), p. 47 27 Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000),p. 137 28 William Allin Storrer, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: a complete catalog, (Third ed., London: The University of Chicago Press, Ltd, 2002), p. 13

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