Rewriting Alberti by Peter Eisenman: Book Launch and Conversation
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Rewriting Alberti by Peter Eisenman. image / MIT Press
To celebrate the publication of Rewriting Alberti (MIT Press, 2025), author Peter Eisenman and MIT's Writing Architecture series editor Cynthia Davidson will host a conversation with contributors Mario Carpo and Daniel Sherer. The book is a fresh analysis of the Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti's five built works. Eisenman posits that Alberti provoked a radical discourse beyond the part-to-whole dialogue featured in his Ten Books of Architecture. His close examination of Alberti's 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.
Free and open to the public. RSVP required.
Peter Eisenman
Founder and Principal, Eisenman Architects; Visiting Critic, Cornell AAP
Peter Eisenman (B.Arch. '55), an internationally recognized architect and educator, is founder and design principal of Eisenman Architects, an architecture and design office in New York City. He is also a Visiting Critic at Cornell University's Gensler Family AAP NYC Center (AAP NYC).
Award-winning projects by Eisenman Architects include the Wexner Center for the Arts and Fine Arts Library at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio; the Koizumi Sangyo Corporation headquarters building in Tokyo; and in Berlin, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and IBA Housing at Checkpoint Charlie, each of which received a National Honor Award for Design from the American Institute of Architects.
Eisenman is also a distinguished author and teacher. Among his many books are Written Into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004 (Yale University Press, 2007) and Ten Canonical Buildings, 1950–2000 (Rizzoli, 2008), which examines the work of ten architects since 1950. His new book, Rewriting Alberti (MIT Press, October 2025), with contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Mario Carpo, and Daniel Sherer, will be presented at AAP NYC on Thursday, November 6.
Eisenman holds a B.Arch. from Cornell University, an M.S. in architecture from Columbia University, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Cambridge University. He holds an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Pratt Institute, Syracuse University, and the Brera Academy of Art in Milan; and an honorary doctorate in architecture from the Università La Sapienza in Rome.
Cynthia Davidson
Cofounder and Executive Director, Anyone Corporation; Visiting Critic, Cornell AAP
Cynthia Davidson is cofounder and executive director of the non-profit Anyone Corporation, an architecture think tank in New York City. She is the editor of the international architecture journal Log, which she launched in 2003, and previously ANY magazine, an architecture theory tabloid (1993–2000). She is also responsible for more than 40 books in print, including 28 books in the Anyone project's Writing Architecture series, published with MIT Press. She cocurated The Architectural Imagination, an exhibition of speculative projects for Detroit, which was first shown in the US Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, and she started the pop-up architecture gallery Anyspace in New York in 2017. Davidson is currently visiting faculty at Princeton University School of Architecture and Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning program in New York City. The American Academy of Arts and Letters recognized her work with its Architecture Award in 2014.
Mario Carpo
Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural Theory and History, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL London
Mario Carpo is the Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural Theory and History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL London. He is also the Gao Feng Professor at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at Tongji University, Shanghai (part-time). He has been a visiting professor at several universities in Europe and in the United States, including the University of Geneva, the University of Florence, the University of Copenhagen, Cornell University, MIT, and Williams College. Currently, he is a Fellow of the Italian Academy at Columbia University in New York City.
Carpo has been a scholar-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2000–01), a resident at the American Academy in Rome (2004), and a scholar-in-residence at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (2014), and Guggenheim Fellow (2022–23). He was the head of the Study Centre at the Centre Canadien d'Architecture in Montréal between 2002 and 2006.
His research and publications focus on the history of early modern architecture and on the theory and criticism of contemporary design and technology. His award-winning Architecture in the Age of Printing (MIT Press, 2001) has been translated into several languages. His most recent books are The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011); The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence (2017); and Beyond Digital. Design and Automation at the End of Modernity (2023), all published by MIT Press.
Daniel Sherer
Architectural Historian, Critic, and Theorist, Princeton School of Architecture
Daniel Sherer is an architectural historian, critic, and theorist who teaches at Princeton School of Architecture. He has taught at Columbia GSAPP, Cooper Union, Cornell AAP, Harvard GSD, and Yale SoA. His areas of research include Italian Renaissance and Baroque Architecture; Modern Architecture in Europe and the USA; modern receptions of humanist architecture; Italian modern architecture and its interactions with art and design; modern architecture and film; and historiography and theory, with an emphasis on Manfredo Tafuri. He has published widely in European and American journals, including AA Files, Artforum, Art Journal, Assemblage, Design Book Review, Domus, Journal of Architecture, JSAH, Log, Perspecta, Potlatch, Vesper, and Zodiac. Sherer's translation of Manfredo Tafuri's Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects (Yale University Press, 2006) won the Sir Nikolaus Pevsner Book Award. He curated the exhibition Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City at Princeton SoA (2018) and was curatorial consultant and participating critic in the 17th Venice Biennale di Architettura (Padiglione Italiana). In 2022–23, he was a Visiting Professor in Architectural History and Theory at the Iuav, University of Venice, Dipartimento Cultura del Progetto; in 2025, he will be a Visiting Professor of Architectural History at the Politecnico di Milano.
