brunelleschi visited rome after his unsuccessful submission for the baptistery doors competition.here he saw a great city in a state of decay. the sheer scale of the roman ruins and the building techniques he analyzed provided inspiration for the greatest problem of structural engineering in italy-- how to complete the cathedral being built in florence. in this great space, we are surrounded by a gothic architecture ripe for the renaissance-- the flat surfaces of the walls, the crisp planar detailing of the piers, with their sharp angles, not a rounded form in sight. it all looks so precise and so completely preplanned. yet if we had stood here half a century after they began to build this building, we would have seen something different. you would still have seen the medieval houses within the existing foundations. as the piers went up, they were still arguing about how high they should be. they had a competition about the capitals' form. they had plaster, wooden, stone models, and when all that was done and they were still arguing about the building's dimensions, they went on fo