Rewriting Alberti

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.

Author: Peter Eisenman
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 10/28/2025
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.20w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780262553711

About the Author
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, author of The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture and Architecture and Abstraction, and 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.