Building with Paper. The Materiality of Renaissance Architectural Drawings

Against the scholarly tendency to treat architectural disegno in highly intellectualized terms, the essays collected in this volume offer a new perspective on this early modern practice, reinserting it into the messy Lebenswelten of the workshop and the building site. The introduction of paper is one of the major innovations of early modern architecture, and it had profound effects on its design processes. Wider use of paper changed representational conventions, while communication networks were affected by the many implications of portability and reproducibility: circulation of models for study and design increased, and new possibilities for remote control of the building site emerged. The material dimensions of these practices are the subject of the present volume, which collects essays that engage with the manifold inter- and multi-medial complexities of Italian Renaissance architectural drawings.