Masterclass - Mannerism and Modern Architecture, Again
Masterclass presented by the UQ Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
Mannerism and Modern Architecture, Again
Professor Andrew Leach (The University of Sydney)
Wednesday 4 October 2017
10.30am-12.00pm, with morning tea from 10.00am.
Room 208 Joyce Ackroyd Building, The University of Queensland
University Drive, St Lucia
RSVP by Monday 2 October to uqche@uq.edu.au
Taking its starting point from a reading of Manfredo Tafuri’s L’architettura del manierismo nel cinquecento europeo (1966), this seminar considers how to figure the mid-twentieth-century historiography of architectural ‘mannerism’ into contemporary architectural debate. The seminar will introduce Tafuri’s work in order to track writing on architectural mannerism up to 1950 and the year, therefore, in which Colin Rowe published his influential essay ‘Mannerism and Modern Architecture’—on which such later works as Bruno Zevi’s treatment of ‘Michelangiolo architetto’ (1964) and Robert Venturi’s embrace of mannerism in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture(1966) one way or another rely. The seminar will consider how mannerism has been understood within the history of modern architectural culture and why that might offer something more than a passing curiosity today. The seminar will introduce Andrew Leach’s small book Crisis on Crisis (forthcoming 2017) and the larger project it will inform at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in 2018.
A pdf copy of Crisis on Crisis will be provided ahead of time, and participants are asked to familiarize themselves with this short volume.
Andrew Leach is Professor of Architecture at the University of Sydney, where he directs the Architectural Theory and History Research Group in the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning. Among his recent works are the short history Rome (2017) and edited collections on the twentieth-century historiography of baroque architecture and of the urbanisation of the Gold Coast (both 2015). Another new book treats the theme of discomfort (2017). He is author of What is Architectural History? (2010) and the book of his lecture Crisis on Crisis, or Tafuri on Mannerism will be published in September. Next year, he will work on a new project, on the modern historiography of architectural mannerism, as a 2017-18 Wallace Fellow at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti.
Image courtesy of the British Museum.