In 15th-century Italy, an architect known as Filarete came up with a groundbreaking system for expelling odors from the latrines of a hospital he was designing in Milan.
Waste from the toilet rooms in the Ospedale Maggiore fell into water-fed subterranean channels directly below. A series of flues rose up through the hospital's walls from those channels to the roof, where vents released noxious odors.
In the following century, this system of ventilation technology was reconceived for a military context. At the time, a military architect known as Antonio da Sangallo the Younger adapted that system of ventilated flues for use within the walls of the Bastione Ardeatino, an elaborate fortress constructed in Rome under Pope Paul III Farnese.
"One of the major challenges within fortress spaces was clearing out the smoke generated from firing cannons," explained Morgan Ng, an assistant professor in Yale's Department of the History of Art. "Efficient ventilation systems developed for hospital contexts could also be used to expel the toxic gunpowder fumes within these military contexts."
That sort of cross-pollination of artistic, technical, and scientific creativity during the Italian Renaissance is the focus of Ng's research. His new book, "Form and Fortification: The Art of Military Architecture in Renaissance Italy" (Yale University Press), explores how this exchange transformed military fortresses at a time when rulers had to adapt their defenses to the rising use of gunpowder in warfare.
"Some of the most cutting-edge defensive technologies arose thanks to the creative adaptations and translations of forms, technologies, and structures from other fields of design, such as urban design, garden planning, palaces, and even churches," said Ng, who is also a trained architect.
He argues that this reprogramming of non-military technologies into military arenas - and vice versa - produced what he calls "cognate technologies," or families of architectural structures and other designed artifacts that were deeply interconnected due to similar underlying structural arrangements, shared operative principles, and a common ancestry. His book illustrates the many underlying connections between military engineering and other forms of Renaissance architecture and landscape design, using a rich array of architectural drawings, photographs, maps, and drawings, many of which were newly discovered in archives and are being published for the first time.
Ng sat down with Yale News to talk about these connections, as revealed in the images paired below. His comments have been condensed and edited.
