Liane Lefaivre, a Canadian and an Austrian, is o-Professor (Professor Ordinaria, that is with a chair and tenure) of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Applied Art in Vienna Austria, now retired.
Lefaivre completed her undergraduate degree at McGill University and her doctorate at the University of Utrecht.
Her writing and research relates to two formative modern periods: first, from the Renaissance to the end of the Enlightenment, and second from the late nineteenth century to the present. She coined, with Alexander Tzonis, her partner in work and in life since 1972, the concept of Critical Regionalism, inspired by the wide-ranging aesthetic, historical, political and environmentalist writings of Lewis Mumford and they have published widely on the topic of critical regionalism as a global phenomenon, in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Greek, German, Chinese and Japanese.
Her Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. (Cambridge, MA., The M.I.T. Press: 1997) won: The Association of American Publishers Award for Best New Scholarly/Professional Book of 1997; The American association of Architects Annual Award for Best Book (in history) for 1997 and The Association of American University Publishers Award (in the category of illustrated books) for 1997. Architecture in Europe since 1960 was a New York Times Book of the Year in 1995 and won the American Association of Architects Annual Award for best book in criticism. Her Rebel Modernists. Viennese Architecture since Otto Wagner was chosen as a book of the year in June 2017 by the Financial Times. She has been the recipient of a Graham Foundation grant in Chicago and a grant from the FWF in Austria.
Her articles have appeared in Architecture, Architectural Record, Archithese, Korean Architect, A+U, Wonen/TABK, the magazine of the Architecture School of Tsinghua University in Beijing, Arquitectura & Vivienda, Arquitectura Viva, Forum, Design Book Review, Casabella, AMC (Architecture, Mouvement, Continuite), La revue du dix-huitieme siecle, Daedalos, A.A.Files, the Harvard Architecture Review, The Architect’s Newspaper, the New Village Journal, Pin-Up, Harvard Design Magazine and Der Standard.
She has lectured at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, Columbia University, MIT, Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, the Politecnico of Milan, the University of La Sapienza in Rome, the Technion in Haifa, Cambridge University, Institut Francais d’Architecture in Paris, the ACSA Meeting in Havana Cuba, the University of California in San Diego, Woodbury College in Los Angeles, the University of Michigan, Betzalel Academy in Jerusalem, Technische Universität Berlin, at the First Shenzhen Biennale in 2007, Tongji University in Shanghai, Tsinghua University in Beijing, the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, the Technical University of Istanbul, the Academy of Art in Hangzhou, the Federal University of Sao Paulo, the Federal University of Rio, and the Federal University of Brasilia, the College de France, McGill University, the Lee Kuan Yew Center for Innovative Cities, the Singapore Institute of Technology and Design, Shenkar Academy in Tel Aviv, WIZO Academy in Haifa, Clemson University, Yale University and Southeast University in Nanjing, the ETH in Zurich, the Museum für angewandte Kunst (The MAK) in Vienna.
In 2002 she curated the exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam under Rudi Fuchs based on her original research into Aldo van Eyck's playgrounds, edited the exhibition catalogue Aldo Van Eyck, The Playgrounds and the City (Summer 2002).
In 2003 she has curated an exhibition and edited a catalogue of the work of Santiago Calatrava entitled Santiago Calatrava. Like a Bird at the Kunsthistorisches Museum under Wilfried Seipel in collaboration with the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, the first exhibition to bring the two museums together (Spring 2003).
In October 2010, she curated with Professor Li Kaisheng of the Chinese Academy of Art in Hangzhou the work of their joint students for a post-traumatic (the earthquake in Sichuan province of 2008) urban design plan based on playgrounds in Dujiangyuan at the Shanghai Art Biennale.
She is a member of the board of The Journal of Architecture (Royal Society of Architects, London), and she has been on the boards of Design Book Review (Berkeley), and Archithèse (Zurich) and Architecture (New York), Architect’s Newspaper (New York) Cahiers de la Recherche (French Ministry of Culture, Paris).
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, called in English Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream or The Dream of Poliphilus, is a book said to be by Francesco Colonna. It is a famous example of an incunable. The work was first published in 1499 in Venice by Aldus Manutius. This first edition has an elegant page layout, with refined woodcut illustrations in an Early Renaissance style. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili presents a mysterious arcane allegory in which the main protagonist, Poliphilo, pursues his love, Polia, through a dreamlike landscape. In the end, he is reconciled with her by the "Fountain of Venus".
Santiago Calatrava Valls is a Spanish architect, structural engineer, sculptor and painter, particularly known for his bridges supported by single leaning pylons, and his railway stations, stadiums, and museums, whose sculptural forms often resemble living organisms. His best-known works include the Olympic Sports Complex of Athens, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Turning Torso tower in Malmö, Sweden, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York City, the Auditorio de Tenerife in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas, Texas, and his largest project, the City of Arts and Sciences and Opera House in his birthplace, Valencia. His architectural firm has offices in New York City, Doha, and Zürich.
Critical regionalism is an approach to architecture that strives to counter the placelessness and lack of identity of the International Style, but also rejects the whimsical individualism and ornamentation of Postmodern architecture. The stylings of critical regionalism seek to provide an architecture rooted in the modern tradition, but tied to geographical and cultural context. Critical regionalism is not simply regionalism in the sense of vernacular architecture. It is a progressive approach to design that seeks to mediate between the global and the local languages of architecture.
Team 10 – just as often referred to as Team X or Team Ten – was a group of architects and other invited participants who assembled starting in July 1953 at the 9th Congress of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) and created a schism within CIAM by challenging its doctrinaire approach to urbanism.
The Zubizuri, also called the Campo Volantin Bridge or Puente del Campo Volantin, is a tied arch footbridge across the Nervion River in Bilbao, Spain. Designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, the bridge links the Campo Volantin right bank and Uribitarte left bank of the river.
Neo-futurism is a late-20th to early-21st-century movement in the arts, design, and architecture.
Kenneth Brian Frampton is a British architect, critic and historian. He is regarded as one of the world's leading historians of modernist and contemporary architecture. He is an Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, New York, where he taught for over 50 years. He is a citizen of Britain and the United States.
Ludwig Christian Friedrich (von) Förster was a German-born Austrian architect. While he was not Jewish, he is known for building Jewish synagogues and churches.
Antoine Babuty Desgodetz's (1653–1728) publication Les edifices antiques de Rome dessinés et mesurés très exactement provided detailed engravings of the monuments and antiquities of Rome to serve French artists and architects. Desgodetz had been sent to Rome in an official capacity, part of French architectural and artistic policy, and the engravings for his publication were supervised by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, according to Desgodetz' introduction. The young architect with a copy of Les edifices antiques de Rome could determine the precise proportions of many Roman structures, such as the portico of the Pantheon, or the Temple of Vesta, Tivoli, that were considered the best models, a practice that had the effect of standardizing the details of academic architecture in France. His Edifices antiques was reissued in Paris, 1729 and again in 1779, when it proved as helpful to Neoclassical architects as it had been to classicizing Late Baroque ones. The young Robert Adam toyed with the idea of producing a revised version of Desgodetz before he hit on the idea of striking into fresh territory with measured engravings of the ruins of Diocletian's palace at Spalatro.
Carlo Lodoli was an Italian architectural theorist, Franciscan priest, mathematician and teacher, whose work anticipated modernist notions of functionalism and truth to materials. He claimed that architectural forms and proportions should be derived from the abilities of the material being used. He is sometimes referred to as the Socrates of architecture since his own writings have been lost his theories are only known from the works of others. Together with architects and architectural theorists including Claude Perrault, Abbé Jean-Louis de Cordemoy, Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier, Lodoli articulated a rational architecture which challenged the prevailing Baroque and Rococo styles.
Christopher Charles Benninger is an Indian architect and urban planner. Born in the US, he permanently migrated to India in 1971. Benninger contributed to the field of critical regionalism and sustainable planning in India.
Demetrios ("Dimitris") Pikionis was a Greek architect, and also painter, of the 20th century who had a considerable influence on modern Greek architecture. He was a founding member of the Association of Greek Art Critics, AICA-Hellas, International Association of Art Critics. His oeuvre includes buildings and urban planning in Athens and the entirety of Greece—including several schools and a playground in Filothei, Athens.
Alexander Tzonis is a Greek-born architect, author, and researcher. He has made contributions to architectural theory, history and design cognition, bringing together scientific and humanistic approaches in a synthesis. Since 1975, he has been collaborating in most projects with Liane Lefaivre. In 1985, he founded and directed Design Knowledge Systems (DKS), a multidisciplinary research institute for the study of architectural theory and the development of design thinking tools at TU Delft. Tzonis is known for his work on the classical canon, history of the emergence and development of modern architectural thinking, creative design by analogy, and introducing the idea of critical regionalism.
Aris Konstantinidis was a Greek modernist architect.
The Sacro Bosco, colloquially called Park of the Monsters, also named Garden of Bomarzo, is a Mannerist monumental complex located in Bomarzo, in the province of Viterbo, in northern Lazio, Italy.
Julien-David Le Roy or Leroy was an 18th-century French architect and archaeologist, who engaged in a rivalry with Britons James Stuart and Nicholas Revett over who would publish the first professional description of the Acropolis of Athens since an early 1682 work by Antoine Desgodetz. Le Roy succeeded in printing his Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece four years ahead of Stuart and Revett.
De pictura is a treatise or commentarii written by the Italian humanist and artist Leon Battista Alberti. The first version, composed in Latin in 1435, was not published until 1450. It is one of his three treatises on art; the other two are De statua and De re aedificatoria, that would form the Renaissance concept for the fine arts: painting, sculpture, and architecture.
Lionel John March was a British mathematician, architect and digital artist, perhaps best known for his early pioneering of computer-aided architecture and art.
Oluwole Olumuyiwa (1929–2000) was a Nigerian architect.
Jakoba Helena Mulder was a Dutch architect and urban planner remembered for her designs of two large city parks and the creation of housing and play spaces in Amsterdam.