Building-in-time from Giotto to Alberti and modern oblivion
By: Marvin Trachtenberg.
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: New Haven
Language: eng
Number of pages: 490
ISBN-13: 9780300165920
Subjects: Architecture -- Italy; Architectural practice -- Italy -- History; Building -- Italy -- History; Architecture -- Philosophy -- History; Time
Description: In the pre-modern age in Europe, the architect built not merely with imagination, bricks and mortar, but with time, using vast quantities of duration as the means to erect monumental buildings that otherwise would have been impossible to achieve. Virtually all the great cathedrals of France and the rest of Europe were built by this deliberate practice, here given the name "Building-in-Time". It places an entirely new light on the major works of pre-modern Italy, from the Pisa cathedral group to the cathedrals of Milan, Venice and Siena, and from the monuments of fourteenth-century Florence to the new St Peter's. Even as this temporal regime was flourishing, the fifteenth-century Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti proposed a new one for architecture, in which time would ideally be excluded from the making of architecture ("Building-outside-Time"). Planning and building, which had always formed one fluid, imbricated process, were to be sharply divided, and the change that always came with time was to be excluded from architectural making.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: In modern oblivion: rethinking architecture, time, and history; title: Regimes of time consciousness in architectural lifeworlds; title: Premodern regimes of architecture and time: theory; title: Building-in-time in "pre-Albertian" Italy: theory; title: The art of building in time: Florentine practice; title: Reflexions of practice; title: Cohabiting temporalities of practice in Brunelleschi; title: Alberti and Brunelleschi; title: Renaissance temporalities after Alberti; title: Afterword: crypto-Albertianism and the oblivion of building-in-time.