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
Rewriting Alberti, architect Peter Eisenman suggests, however, that Alberti provoked a radical discourse beyond the part-to-whole dialogue featured in his
Ten Books of Architecture. Eisenman's in-depth analysis of Alberti's five built works reveals a disjunction between the architect's buildings and theoretical writings, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning based on the fragmentation of homogeneous space.
Rewriting Alberti includes contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Mario Carpo, and Daniel Sherer. Carpo, an architectural historian and critic, theorizes that Alberti's work initiated an idea of the discipline as a notational system akin to contemporary computational logics. By way of comparison, Sherer, an architectural historian, reconsiders critic Manfredo Tafuri's readings of Alberti, and architect and theorist Aureli draws on Alberti to propose another idea of the architectural "project."
Here, in one book are four different discourses (and more than 60 drawings) that look back at the origins of architectural signs and semiology and forward to understand the way that history informs architecture today.
Peter Eisenman is an architect, educator, and author. Among his many books are
Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques; Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950-2000; Palladio Virtuel, and, most recently,
Lateness.
Pier Vittorio Aureli teaches at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He is the cofounder of the architectural office Dogma, the author of
The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Architecture and Abstraction, and the coauthor of
Living and Working (all with the MIT Press).
Mario Carpo is the Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History at the Bartlett-UCL in London and Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Applied Arts (die Angewandte) in Vienna. His books include
Architecture in the Age of Printing and
The Second Digital Turn (both with the MIT Press).
Daniel Sherer is an architectural historian, critic, and theorist who teaches at the Princeton School of Architecture. His translation of Manfredo Tafuri's
Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes Cities Architects won the Sir Nikolaus Pevsner Book Award in 2006.
彼得·艾森曼（Peter Eisenman）是一位建築師、教育家和作家。他的著作包括《朱塞佩·特拉尼：轉變、分解、批評》（Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques）、《十座經典建築：1950-2000》（Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950-2000）、《虛擬的帕拉第奧》（Palladio Virtuel），以及最近出版的《晚期》（Lateness）。
皮爾·維托里奧·奧雷利（Pier Vittorio Aureli）在洛桑聯邦理工學院（École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL）任教。他是建築事務所Dogma的共同創辦人，著作包括《絕對建築的可能性》（The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture）、《建築與抽象》（Architecture and Abstraction），以及共同作者的《生活與工作》（Living and Working，均由麻省理工學院出版社出版）。
馬里奧·卡爾波（Mario Carpo）是倫敦巴特利特-UCL的雷納·班哈姆建築歷史教授，並在維也納應用藝術大學（die Angewandte）擔任建築理論教授。他的著作包括《印刷時代的建築》（Architecture in the Age of Printing）和《第二次數位轉向》（The Second Digital Turn，均由麻省理工學院出版社出版）。
丹尼爾·謝爾（Daniel Sherer）是一位建築歷史學家、評論家和理論家，在普林斯頓建築學院任教。他翻譯的曼弗雷多·塔富里（Manfredo Tafuri）著作《解讀文藝復興：王子、城市、建築師》（Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes Cities Architects）於2006年獲得尼古拉斯·佩夫斯納書獎（Sir Nikolaus Pevsner Book Award）。
