The church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, also called San Carlino, is an architectural artefact that continues to attract numerous hypotheses and geometric analyses attempting to explain its form and meaning. Numerous investigations have attempted to reveal its underlying geometrical principles, without, however, reaching a consensus. Finding San Carlino presents an edited collection of perspectives on Borromini’s famous Baroque church from a range of established and emerging scholars in architectural history and theory, including Werner Oechslin, Karsten Harries, Michael Hill and Lauren Jacobi amongst others. This book offers the reader different means of engaging with, enjoying and articulating San Carlino’s complexity, non-consensus and ambiguity. It is precisely such a unique disposition that motivates this book to explore multiple modes of architectural enquiry and delve into a series of theoretical and historiographical questions such as: why was Borromini not able to post-rationalize his architecture with his drawings? What is San Carlino’s exemplary value, and why does it continually engender exegetical and hermeneutic desire? What is the role of geometry in architecture, in history and today? Written for researchers, scholars and postgraduate students in architectural history and theory, the book uses San Carlino as an enigmatic centering point for a set of significant contemporary voices to explore new modes of confrontation and comparison.

This project is born out of similar questions and discussions on the topic of organicism emergent from two critical strands regarding the discourse of organic self-generation: one dealing with the problem of stopping in the design processes in history, and the other with the organic legacy of style in the nineteenth century as a preeminent form of aesthetic ideology. The epistemologies of self-generation outlined by enlightenment and critical philosophy provided the model for the discursive formations of modern urban planning and architecture. The form of the organism was thought to calibrate modernism’s infinite extension. The architectural organicism of today does not take on the language of the biological sciences, as they did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but rather the image of complex systems, be they computational/informational, geo/ecological, or even ontological/aesthetic ‘networks’. What is retained from the modernity of yesterday is the ideology of endless self-generation. Revisiting such a topic feels relevant now, in a time when the idea of endless generation is rendered more suspect than ever, amid an ever increasing speed and complexity of artificial intelligence (AI) networks. The essays collected in this book offer a variety of critiques of the modernist idea of endless growth in the fields of architecture, literature, philosophy, and the history of science. They range in scope from theoretical and speculative to analytic and critical and from studies of the history of modernity to reflections of our contemporary world. Far from advocating a return to the romantic forms of nineteenth-century naturphilosophie, this project focuses on probing organicism for new forms of critique and emergent subjectivities in a contemporary, 'post'-pandemic constellation of neo-naturalism in design, climate change, complex systems, and information networks. This book will be of interest to a broad range of researchers and professionals in architecture and art history, historians of science, visual artists, and scholars in the humanities more generally.

The planetary instantaneity that digital technologies have enabled is leading to an effacement of the divisions that separate the past from the future, ensuring that the present is ubiquitous. While contemporary architecture seems to have lost the capacity to conceive of the past as a transformative force, this book stresses the need to rethink today's complex temporal mechanisms through the notion of the untimely. This concept opens up a whole spectrum of possibilities to go beyond what seems predictable. The contributors to this book employ critical concepts and architectural design tools in order to offer experimental and speculative approaches for unknown futures of architecture.

Digital Fabrication in Interior Design: Body, Object, Enclosure draws together emerging topics of making that span primary forms of craftsmanship to digital fabrication in order to theoretically and practically analyze the innovative and interdisciplinary relationship between digital fabrication technology and interior design. The history of making in interior design is aligned with traditional crafts, but a parallel discourse with digital fabrication has yet to be made evident. This book repositions the praxis of experimental prototyping and integrated technology to show how the use of digital fabrication is inherent to the interior scales of body, objects and enclosure. These three scales act as a central theme to frame contributions that reinforce the interdisciplinary nature of interior design and reinterpret traditional crafts by integrating new methods of making into conventional workflows. Featuring significant international practitioners and researchers, the selected contributions represent the ever-increasing interdisciplinary nature of design, demonstrating a breadth of disciplines. A foundational text for interiors students and practitioners, Digital Fabrication in Interior Design expands the necessary dialogue about digital fabrication at the scale of interiors to inform design theory and practice.

Giuseppe Campani, “Inventor Romae,” an Uncommon Genius offers an account of the life and creations of the most talented maker of optic lenses, silent clocks and projector clocks of the second half of the seventeenth century but also provides you with unique insights into the scientific and technological landscape of baroque Rome and its links to a broader European scene.

This book examines the creative exchanges between architects, artists and intellectuals, from the Early Renaissance to the beginning of the Enlightenment, in the forging of relationships between architecture and emerging concepts of language in early modern Italy. The study extends across the spectrum of linguistic disputes during this time – among members of the clergy, humanists, philosophers and polymaths – on issues of grammar, rhetoric, philology, etymology and epigraphy, and how these disputes paralleled and informed important developments in architectural thinking and practice. Drawing upon a wealth of primary source material, such as humanist tracts, philosophical works, architectural/antiquarian treatises, epigraphic/philological studies, religious sermons and grammaticae, the book traces key periods when the emerging field of linguistics in early modern Italy impacted on the theory, design and symbolism of buildings.