A fresh, groundbreaking analysis of renowned Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti’s five built works, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning.Much has been written about Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti’s mantra of part-to-whole as one of the continuing conditions of architecture. While this underlying thesis has often been repeated in the annals of architectural history and theory, architects have rarely questioned the idea. In Rewri...

How the different narratives of four historians of architectural modernism—Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and Manfredo Tafuri—advanced specific versions of modernism.Architecture, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, has suspended historical references in favor of universalized abstraction. In the decades after the Second World War, when architectural historians began to assess the legacy of the avant-gardes in order to construct a cohe...

A provocative case for historical ambiguity in architecture by one of the field's leading theoristsConceptions of modernity in architecture are often expressed in the idea of the zeitgeist, or "spirit of the age," an attitude toward architectural form that is embedded in a belief in progressive time. Lateness explores how architecture can work against these linear currents in startling and compelling ways. In this incisive book, internationally renowned ar...

ZERO PIRANESI Giovanni Battista Piranesi's engravings, Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma of 1762, have a peculiar position within the discipline of ar- chitecture. With their dissemination, the folio collection of six etch- ings have till this day nurtured architects' speculations on the city. Since the Enlightenment, they - and in particular the Campo Marzio plan - have fuelled research, discussions and visions for the future of architecture. These engravings are also some of the most beau- t...