Mario Carpo

Affiliations:

• Post-Professional and PhD Progams, College of Architecture

Biosketch:

Mario Carpo (born 1958) is an architectural historian and critic.  He specializes in the history of architectural theory and his work focuses on the relationship between architectural design and cultural technologies, past and present.  He has published extensively on Renaissance architectural theory, on the history and culture of digital technologies and on contemporary design matters.

 

CV Highlights:

Carpo has a degree in architecture (Italian "tesi di laurea") from the University of Florence (1983), and is a licensed architect in Italy.  He received a Ph.D. in modern history from the European University Institute (IUE) in 1990.

He was a doctoral researcher at the European University Institute from 1984 to 1987, then an assistant professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland from 1987 to 1993.  In 1993 he received tenure in France, where he was first assigned to the School of Architecture of Saint-Etienne, then to the School of Architecture of Paris-La Villette.  He was appointed at the College of Architecture of Georgia Tech in 2009.

Carpo has held visiting professorships at many distinguished universities in Europe and the United States, including the University of Geneva (1994-97), Cornell University (spring term 1996), the University of Copenhagen (spring term 1997), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (fall term of 2002), Williams College (spring term of 2004), the Polytechnic School in Milan (spring term of 2007), and Yale University (spring term of 2008).  He was a visiting scholar at the Clark Art Institute in the spring of 2000, a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2000-01, a resident at the American Academy in Rome in the fall of 2004, and the Head of the Study Centre at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal from 2002 to 2005.

Main publications (books)

With Francesco Furlan.  Leon Battista Alberti’s "Delineation of the City of Rome" ("Descriptio Vrbis Romæ").  Edited by Mario Carpo and Francesco Furlan.  Critical edition by Jean-Yves Boriaud and Francesco Furlan.  English translation by Peter Hicks. Tempe, AZ: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2007.  132 pp., illustrated.

 With Frédérique Lemerle-Pauwels.  Perspective, Projections and Design. Technologies of Architectural Representation.  Edited by Mario Carpo and Frédérique Lemerle.  London and New York: Routledge, 2007.  196 pp., illustrated.  An earlier version published in French as  Perspective, projections, projet. Technologies de la représentation architecturale, conference proceedings, Centre d'études supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours, June 12-14, 2003.  Edited by Mario Carpo and Frédérique Lemerle-Pauwels.  Cahiers de la Recherche Architecturale et Urbaine 17.  Paris: Centre des monuments nationaux et éditions du patrimoine, 2005.  192 pp., illustrated.

 Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory.  Cambridge, MA and London, England: The MIT Press, 2001.  246 pp., illustrated.  Recipient of the Spiro Kostof Prize conferred by the Society of Architectural Historians (April 2003).  Shortlisted for the Bruno Zevi Prize conferred by the International Society of Architectural Critics (October 2003).  First published in Italian as L'architettura dell'età della stampa. Oralità, scrittura, libro stampato e riproduzione meccanica dell'immagine nella storia delle teorie architettoniche. Milan: Jaca Book, 1998.  241 pp., illustrated.  Spanish translation, with a new preface: La arquitectura en la era de la imprenta.  Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2003.  French translation, with a new preface: L'architecture à l'âge de l'imprimerie. Paris: Editions de la Villette, 2009.

With Martine Furno. Leon Battista Alberti : "Descriptio Urbis Romae." édition critique, traduction et commentaire.  Cahiers d’Humanisme et Renaissance 56. Geneva: Droz, 2000.  196 pp., illustrated.

La maschera e il modello. Teoria architettonica ed evangelismo nell'Extraordinario Libro di Se­bastiano Serlio (1551).  Preface by Joseph Rykwert.  Milan: Jaca Book, 1993.  141 pp., illustrated.

Metodo ed ordini nella teoria architettonica dei primi moderni. Alberti, Raffaello, Serlio e Camillo.  Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance 271.  Geneva: Droz 1993. 228 pp.

Recent publications  

"Authors, Agents, Agencies, and the Digital Public." In Visions, Catalogue of the 9th edition of Beyond Media, International Festival for Architecture and Media, Florence, Italy, 9-17 July 2009, edited by Marco Brizzi and Paola Giaconia, 71-73. Florence: Image Publishing, 2009.

"Revolución 2.0.  El fin de la autoría humanista." Arquitectura Viva 124 (2009), 19-26  (in Spanish). 

"The  Bubble and the Blob." Lotus International 138 (2009), 19-27 (in Italian and English).

"Aufstieg und Fall der identischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Zu Leon Battista Albertis unzeitgemässer Entdeckung digitaler Technologien in der Frührenaissance."  In Kulturtechnik Entwerfen. Praktiken, Konzepte und Medien in Architektur und Design Science, edited by Daniel Gethmann and Susanne Hauser, 49-65. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009 (in German).

"Revolutions. Some New Technologies in Search of an Author." Log 15 (2009), 49-54. Republished in English and translated into Italian and German in "Zona, 3", edited by Jörg Gleiter, Abitare 489 (2009): 14-19 (translations: i-xvi, appended).

"On Both Sides of the Fence. Authorship, Precision, and Other Anomalies in an Age of Variable Objects."  In Valerio Olgiati, edited by Laurent Stalder, 128-190. Cologne: Walther König, 2008. (The same book also published in German).

"Monstrous Objects, Morphing Things."  In “Monster,” edited by Jacob Reidel et al., Perspecta 40 (2008): 16-21.   An earlier version published (in German) as "Video Killed The Iconic Star. Inkarnationen der Architektur im Zeitalter unbeständinger Bilder."  In Die Realität des Imaginären. Architektur und das digitale Bild. Conference proceedings, 10. Internationales Bauhaus-Kolloquium, Weimar 2007, edited by Jörg H. Gleiter, Norbert Korrek, and Gerd Zimmermann, 37-42. Weimar, Verlag der Bauhaus Universität, 2008.

 

 

Mario Carpo photo © Tommaso Tanini / Image, Firenze

 

 

 

Carpo's first books have studied Renaissance architectural theory within the context of the renewal of the arts of discourse in early modern Europe (Metodo e Ordini, 1993), and of religious strife at the outset of the Protestant Reformation (La Maschera e il Modello, 1993).  His award-winning Architecture in the Age of Printing (2001) discusses the role of print and printed images in the shaping of Western architectural theory, in the Renaissance and beyond.

Carpo's more recent work deals with the history of the cultural technologies that, from Alberti's invention of the modern notational paradigm to today's digital turn, have been used to record, transmit, communicate, and materialize architectural form.  This interpretive approach underpins a number of essays and articles on contemporary architects and design issues, as well as essays and monographs on early modern image theory and design technologies (Descriptio Urbis Romae, 2000 and 2007; Perspective, Projections and Design, 2007).  A monograph on the "long history" of digital design is forthcoming with a major American publisher.

Carpo lectures frequently in Europe and America.  He has organized, co-organized or chaired conferences and symposia and sits on the editorial or advisory boards of scholarly journals and architectural magazines in France, Germany and Italy. 

 

Publications

Complete list of publications
(by genre and chronologically ordered)
attached as a PDF

 

Courses Taught:

• ARCH 2111/4105:  History I > History of Architecture, Ancient to the Eighteenth Century.   (co-taught)
  This course is the first of a two course sequence covering the history of architecture from Ancient to Modern times. This course introduces the architecture produced from approximately 2000 BC to AD 1800 by cultures throughout the world, with an emphasis on those sources of influence on the architecture of the Americas.
  
  
• COA 8853 MC; CRN 90679;  Special Topic-History & Theory.
  Digital Cultures, history and theory > An introduction to the history and theory of the cultural technologies involved in the processes of architectural design, focusing on the invention of the modern ("Albertian") mode of design during the Renaissance, and on its present demise, due to the rise of digital tools.