A fresh, groundbreaking analysis of renowned Renaissance architect Leon Battista Albertis five built works, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning.
Much has been written about Renaissance architect Leon Battista Albertis mantra of part-to-whole as one of the continuing conditions of architecture. While this underlying thesis has oft 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. Eisenmans in-depth analysis of Albertis five built works reveals a disjunction between the architects 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 Albertis 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 Tafuris 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) which look back at the origins of architectural signs and semiology and forward to understand the way that history informs architecture today.
