Lecture date: 1997-11-14
Arguably the most passionate work ever written about architecture, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili details its hero’s romantic love for buildings. The book charts the hero’s attempts to make love with the objects of his desire – attempts which have the effect, for the hero and the buildings alike, of sheer erotic ecstasy. In this lecture Liane Lefaivre argues that the answer to the text’s incomprehensible Joycean ‘Joysprikean’ prose and its title lies in the hitherto undisclosed identity of its author, claimed by Lefaivre to be Leon Battista Alberti.
Liane Lefaivre, formerly a researcher at the Technical University of Delft, is Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. She is the author of the award-winning book Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-Cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance as well as a number of co-authored publications with Alexander Tzonis, including Classical Architecture: The Poetics of Order and Architecture in North America since 1960.
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