Mark Jarzombek, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture, currently is also the Associate Dean of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning. He has taught at MIT since 1995download this article (pdf), and has worked on a range of historical topics from the Renaissance to the modern, and worked extensively on nineteenth and twentieth century aesthetics. His first book On Leon Battista Alberti, His Literary and Aesthetic Theories (MIT Press), inaugurated an important reinterpretation of the noted Renaissance humanist. His second book, The Psychologizing of Modernity, Art, Architecture and History (Cambridge University Press, 2000), historicized a complex set of issues around the question of subjectivity and modernity. Jarzombek, who was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, received his architectural Diploma in 1980 from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1986. He was Post-doctoral Resident Fellow at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Humanities and Art, Santa Monica, California, in 1986 and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, in 1993. In 2002, he was resident fellow at the Canadian Center for Architecture. He has received numerous awards for his research as well as for the various international conferences that he has organized. He has published in a wide range of journals including the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Assemblage, and Renaissance Studies. He has just published a textbook entitled A Global History of Architecture (Wiley Press, 2006) with co-author Vikram Prakash with the noted illustrator Francis D.K. Ching. Jarzombek is currently working on a set of essays on architecture and modernity.

Recent Interview:

April 23, 2009 in Murcia Spain produced by Observatorio del Diseño y la Arquitectura

The interview covers a range of topics from Sustainability to the future of architecture.

Latest publication:

"Working Out Johnson's Role in History" in Philip Johnson. The Constancy of Change, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)

The paper analyzes the architecture of Philip Johnson from the perspective of his larger opus. -- posted July 09

"A Green Masterplan is Still a Masterplan" in Urban Transformations, Ilka and Andreas Ruby, eds. (Berlin, 2008) 22-9.

This paper is a critique of the 'masterplan syndrome' and looks at a few urban design projects that try to work outside of that framework. -- posted Jan 09