Short answers, pulled from the story.
The earliest surviving written work on architecture is by the Roman architect Vitruvius in the early 1st century BC. His treatise established three principles commonly known as firmness, commodity, and delight.
Renaissance Europe from about 1400 onwards saw a revival of Classical learning accompanied by the development of Renaissance humanism. This movement placed greater emphasis on the role of the individual in society compared to the Medieval period.
Filippo Brunelleschi added the dome to the Florence Cathedral in Italy during the early 15th century. He transformed not only the building but also the city and the role status of the architect himself through innovative engineering solutions combined with artistic vision.
The Bauhaus school founded in Weimar Germany in 1919 redefined architectural bounds prior set throughout history. It viewed creation of a building as the ultimate synthesis of art craft and technology.
Robert Venturi famously defined postmodern architecture as a decorated shed which is ordinary building functionally designed inside and embellished on outside. He upheld this concept against modernist and brutalist ducks described as buildings with unnecessarily expressive tectonic forms.