Lives of the Most Excellent Architects

One of architecture's oddities is that its bibliography features very little biography, since most architects of the last 2,000 years have been telling us about everything except themselves. It is this omission that this course seeks to address, and is inspired by the only sustained investigation into architectural biography, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550). Prompted by Vasari, the lectures will present a history of architecture through a series of characters, as well as images, quotations, and sound recordings, not so much as a history of their projects, but as a history of their lives.