The notion that there is or should be an architectural language—or more than one—has a provenance dating to ancient times. In classic form, the architecture-as-language thesis runs from the Vitruvian suggestion that the orders present rules for combination and ordering of architectural parts, through Alberti’s rhetoric-inspired model for architectural description (van Eck 2000), and an analogy common among Renaissance and early modern authors (such as Wren) of architectural rules and expressive capacity with the Latin language. Lavin (1992) suggests that Quatremère de Quincy (1803) develops the thesis, from a traditional view of the classical orders as grammatical building blocks directly representing primitive structures, to a modern view of structural elements broadly representing social and moral ideas and principles. Variations of the thesis range over elements of an architectural language, how it may be used, and from whence it may be derived.