Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
Mark Jarzombek, associate dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Architecture and Planning, presented "Global History: Global Paradox" 5:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 27, in Preston Geren Auditorium at Texas A&M's Langford Architecture Center.
Jarzombek's presentation continued the Fall 2010 Department of Architecture Lecture Series.
A professor of architecture history and theory at MIT, Jarzombek's academic focus encompasses a range of historical topics from the Renaissance to the modern, including extensive work on 19th and 20th century aesthetics.
His first book, "On Leon Battista Alberti, His Literary and Aesthetic Theories," (1989), inaugurated a reinterpretation of the noted Renaissance humanist.
"Jarzombek's knowledge of Alberti's writings, his grasp of the man's thought, and his painstaking analysis of Alberti's nearly chameleonic identity are as thorough and sound as they are unique," said Kurt W. Forester, director of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. "He seriously alters received ideas and conventional views, carving out a different place for his important subject and enlivening and transforming our image of Alberti."
In "A Global History of Architecture," Jarzombek, co-author Vikramaditya Prakash and illustrator Francis D.K. Ching, take a comprehensive, chronological approach to their far-ranging subject.
"Not only does 'A Global History of Architecture' own the territory (of world architecture), it pulls off this audacious task with panache, intelligence and — for the most part — grace," states a review in a 2008 issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. "The slices of time in "A Global History" provide a richer learning experience for an introductory course."
Jarzombek has also published in a wide range of journals, including the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Assemblage, and Renaissance Studies, and received numerous awards for research and international conferences he has organized.
After earning a Ph.D. in 1986 from MIT, Jarzombek was a post-doctoral resident Fellow at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Humanities and Art in Santa Monica, Calif. and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., in 1993. In 2002, he was a resident Fellow at the Canadian Center for Architecture.
- Posted: Sept. 8, 2010 -
Contact: Phillip Rollfing, prollfing@archone.tamu.edu or 979.458.0442.
