Rewriting Alberti drives a wedge between what Leon Battista Alberti wrote and what he actually built, using close analysis of five constructed works to expose a fragmentation of space that his own theoretical writings — the canonical Ten Books of Architecture — never acknowledged.
About This Book
The part-to-whole thesis has long anchored readings of Alberti's architecture, repeated across decades of architectural history without serious challenge. Peter Eisenman changes that. His analysis of Alberti's five built works reveals a persistent disjunction between text and building — a gap in which a new relationship between architectural form and meaning quietly operates. Gathering four distinct critical voices and more than sixty drawings, the book maps the origins of architectural semiology and asks what that history demands of practice today. It is essential reading for anyone engaged with Renaissance architecture, architectural theory, or the relationship between drawing, notation, and built form.
Key Features
- 224 pages including more than 60 drawings analysing Alberti's five built works
- Contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Mario Carpo, and Daniel Sherer
- Published by The MIT Press
What You'll Discover
- How Alberti's built works diverge from his theoretical writings, producing a fragmentation of homogeneous space that his Ten Books does not account for
- Mario Carpo's argument that Alberti's work initiated an understanding of architecture as a notational system analogous to contemporary computational logics
- Daniel Sherer's reassessment of critic Manfredo Tafuri's influential readings of Alberti, placing them in dialogue with Eisenman's own analysis
- Pier Vittorio Aureli's proposition — drawn from Alberti — for a renewed conception of the architectural project as a distinct intellectual and political undertaking
About the Author
Peter Eisenman is an architect and theorist whose work has shaped postwar architectural discourse through both practice and writing. His sustained engagement with architectural semiology, formal analysis, and the history of Renaissance theory positions him as one of the field's most persistent critical voices.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 224
- Dimensions: 203 x 136 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780262553711
- Publisher: The MIT Press
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and theorists interested in Renaissance architecture and its contested legacy; readers of Tafuri, Aureli, or Carpo; students and academics working in architectural history, theory, and semiology.