“Men first felt necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance” -Giambattista Vico, New Science, 241 (1744).

Who, the reader might well ask, is “babyvitruvius”? How can a long-dead architectural theorist—the mustiest, most pedantic, and unquestionably most difficult to understand of all architectural thinkers before the 20^th century—be an infant, that cuddliest (and loudest) of newborns, crawling before the readers’ astonished eyes, to greet him or her with an unfeigned, because unfeignable, freshness of vision?