At the close of the sixteenth century, the Roman architect Domenico Fontana choreographed the transformation of the Vatican Obelisk from its antique position on the circus of Nero, to its present location facing St. Peter's. Fontana's treatise Della trasportatione dell'obelisco Vaticano (1590), records this event in a detailed narrative, and a series of remarkable etchings. Architect to Pope Sixtus V, Fontana is often cited as a founder of city planning due to his seminal reorganization of Rome's topography, and as an early proponent of civil engineering owing to his calculated mechanics. Yet neither of these appellations do justice to Fontana's complex practice, one in which architecture is composed in time, characterized by the intensity and profundity of the festival, and the divine power of Man to operate within a world of sympathies. The scaffold which translates the obelisk---and the occulted knowledge of these cosmographic relations---into the space of the city, also invokes an alternate tradition for architecture. Opposite classical solidity and eternal being, Fontana's castello proposes the immaterial, and the ephemeral. An inquiry into this scene of emerging order is particularly relevant for our contemporary world, with our idols fallen and our foundations in rain. / Appended to this thesis is an abridged English translation of Della trasportatione, chapter 1.

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