Architecture in the Age of Printing

Mario Carpo's book combines erudition and wit in his path-breaking interpretation of the printed image's impact on architectural design. A renewed intellectual landscape of Renaissance architecture emerges, through an investigation of the way publishing technologies and strategies shape discourse and practical construction. We owe Carpo a well-deserved thanks for his fascinating account of the earliest, and not the least inspiring, encounter between architectural theory and the media.

Jean-Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Director, Institut Français d'architecture, Paris

Mario Carpo's rich text is filled with stimulating propositions and observations about the relation of early modern architecture to the printed image. Starting with an overview of the exclusively verbal transmission of technical knowledge in the middle ages—before it was possible to provide identical images in different copies of any text (a problem that continued through the fifteenth century), he shows how the development of a technology that permitted books to be illustrated with woodcut and engraved plates expanded architects' knowledge of their heritage beyond what any individual could have achieved by personal experience, and made it possible to offer models (such as Sebastiano Serlio's establishment of a canon of five orders) for a new architecture. The impact of the images far exceeded that of the text. Carpo's grounding in contemporary representation theory gives his study psychological and philosophical support and his wide-ranging knowledge and engaging style make this book a pleasure to read.

James S. Ackerman, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Fine Arts Emeritus, Harvard University

The connection between print and architecture is profound. Print makes possible the exact reproduction of visual statement. Before the age of print, no one in the world had ever seen exact copies of a fairly complicated design, and certainly not thousands of exact copies of such a design. In his Architecture in the Age of Printing, the learned historian of architecture and its contexts, Mario Carpo, provides a historically wide-ranging, detailed, and thoroughly learned study of architecture as it evolved before print and then in connection with print. There has been nothing this complete or penetrating before.

Walter J. Ong, S. J., University Professor Emeritus, St. Louis University