This volume is an ambitious livre à these(s) that presents a theory of architecture and building practice in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, with a special focus on Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti. The author frames his narrative within the triad of time, money, and scale of work, elements that conditioned architectural practice (though this reader wonders if function, or what Vitruvius called utilitas in his triad, should not also be an equal component of the equation). Because the topic spans many centuries, with an epilogue that touches on contemporary architecture, and also because of its length and density (420 double-columned pages of text), this stimulating and important book would “take a village” to review properly, and it will no doubt be the object of discussion and debate for years to come. Yet it does what a book should do: open eyes to the reality of construction as a dynamic process in and between buildings as distinct from the ideal of the architectural project as conceived and propagated by Leon Battista Alberti.

After an introduction that outlines the essential concepts, the volume moves into a disquisition on changing perceptions of time and the social/psychological implications of public clocks and hourglasses. This leads to the proposal that Alberti derived the idea of architectural authorship, and ultimately the ideal project “outside time,” from literature, applying the concept of the integrity of a written text to “make architecture behave like literature” in its procedure of conception and in its facture. The architect was thereby transformed from artisan into auctores. The “fixing” of architectural authorship could be achieved by various means: publication, scale models, legislation, or, finally, strategic building practice that “locked into place” essential elements in order to inexorably determine the rest. The architect could also attempt to maintain his concept by refusing to go elsewhere, as Howard Burns demonstrated in his pivotal article “Building Against Time,” (in L'Église dans l'architecture de la Renaissance: Actes du colloque tenu à Tours du 28 au 31 mai, 1990 [Paris, Picard, 1995], 107–114).

Trachtenberg proposes that Alberti's elevation of the architect was the theorist's response to (and rivalry with) the fame of Brunelleschi and his dome—the god-like promotion of the architect as theorist, an intellectualizing alternative to the craftsman and mason. Thus, Burns's 1995 article on Michelangelo and building process hovers both behind the title of this book and significant parts of the volume. Trachtenberg suggests that Michelangelo at St. Peter's engaged in a form of “Albertian thinking” by asserting his “supreme importance” as architect/author, even though the realities and complexities of the project superseded any system beyond Michelangelo's dogged physical presence.

Trachtenberg proposes four interlocked strategies for approaches to construction prior to Alberti: first, continuous redesign: urban and architectural projects respond to ever-changing practical needs, evolving social practice and reformulations of identity. Change is thus the normative condition of building and urban space; second, myopic progression: the resolution of design details as part of on-going construction (for example, corrections to the tower of Pisa as it continued to rise); third, concatenation: each architectural intervention is based on the previous structure in a series of “web-like links”; fourth, retrosynthesis: the cross-referentiality of all parts; planning is synoptic, taking into consideration and “folding in with” the historic past and the evolving on-going needs of the present.

These principles are primarily applied to Italian examples of construction planted within communes. Yet they could also pertain to buildings north of the Alps, especially those with a particularly tradition-laden history, such as Abbot Suger's work at St. Denis. Here the abbot's attention to achieving consensus within the monastic community, his emphasis on harmony and concordance between new and old, and the his concern to maintain the proportions and some of the historic walls of the old church all attest to retrosynthesis and concatenation, as Sumner Crosby demonstrated decades ago. Change was thus a normative condition of building and urban space (rather than, as some medievalists suggest, necessarily a sign or signature of a new workshop or master-builder).

The author moves forward to consider the practice of “Building-in-Time” in mostly Tuscan, especially Florentine, monuments. There are also extended considerations of the cathedrals of Milan and Orvieto, and San Petronio in Bologna. The author cites examples in Florence and Siena where unfinished cathedral projects presented a series of hard choices between scale, available income, and time to completion. He expands these concepts to the Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo and the Pazzi Chapel, contrasting two different construction time-frames as perhaps reflecting different political and strategic values that were largely independent of financing, describing the latter's long-term construction as “sociocultural stealth.”

The observation that Italian architecture was largely corporate is important, even if it is characteristic of much medieval architecture more specifically. Projects were undertaken by a collective (that is, a monastery, a friary, a bishop in collaboration with the cathedral chapter, the commune): “it was the community that built, . . . not the individual or collaborative and conflicted pair or individual patron and architect.” Time was therefore not conditioned by the individual lifespan but rather an open-ended future in which the collective guaranteed a trans-generational investment in the communal entity framed in terms of the future-oriented eschatology of the church. For example, the commune of Florence in 1368 prohibited change to the Duomo project irrespective of who was in charge. This effectively denied the opportunity for design creativity to future generations of master-masons/architects. In this modus operandi there was no place for the architect as author, but rather the capomastro who managed the aggregated “desire” of the commune. In addition, by the High Middle Ages, architecture in Italy was primarily engaged in reshaping buildings and urban space within the walls of existing cities: construction was dominated by the process of reformulating (or expanding, or renovating) a spatial and structural reality in a densely packed urban setting. Corporate structure and a longue durée approach permitted a detachment from the concept of completion, which could be understood within the frame of an imponderable expansion of time. In this formulation, medieval communities deferred or renounced the “tangible sensuous pleasure and immediate possession and . . . use . . . for . . . a far-distant, unknowable and perhaps unattainable future moment.” Trachtenberg unfolds his construction narratives in terms of his four principles of redesign, myopic progression, retrosynthesis, and concatenation, particularly effective for the cathedral, the Campanile, and the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence. Although the author includes an evocative description of Sta. Maria Novella, the discussion of this church and Sta. Croce is perhaps less effective because the building chronologies are less closely argued.

The volume expands beyond Florence to consider other sites, especially San Marco in Venice and the Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa, both described as aggregative assemblages of buildings that created massive representational complexes combining both civic and religious values. The spaces are analyzed as proportional and geometric relationships. The author considers Ackerman's article on Milan Cathedral in relation to the expertise brought in to solve fundamental design issues. Trachtenberg's critique of Ackerman's study is that the article was formulated in a post-Albertian concept of building and time. The book moves on to consider the campo and cathedral of Siena, the construction process of the latter described as dominated by “a nagging sense of architectural inadequacy and perennially unconsummated desire” (254). In a careful study of the successive projects, Trachtenberg shows how his four principles failed the “self-intoxicated architectural ambitions” of the Sienese.

The second half of this chapter shifts to the topic of the capomastro—the professional builder (Neri di Fioravanti, Francesco Talenti, and others) who directed projects toward successful (re)conception and sometimes even “completion,” a term to be used with caution in the context of most buildings. A subsequent section concerns artists who took on the direction of architectural projects, such as Arnolfo di Cambio, Andrea Pisano, Andrea Orcagna, Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, and Andrea di Firenze (as well as Tino di Camaino, not discussed here but very important for Naples). This evolves into a critique of some of the existing literature on Italian Gothic architecture (Grodecki, Wilson), both of which, however, are (for this author at least), written in a somewhat dated formalist tradition.

Trachtenberg does not engage with the “historical conditioning” of architectural choices in Italy. It is important to note that most Italian communes would have perceived the Gothic style as both “feudal” and “ecclesiastical”—therefore not appropriate to communal ideals (See, for instance, Caroline Bruzelius, “A Rose by any Other Name: the “Not Gothic Enough” Architecture of Italy,” in Reading Gothic Architecture, ed. M. Reeve, Studies in Medieval Visual Culture I (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 93–109). A concluding section of the sixth chapter discusses the roles of painters and sculptors as designers of several high-level architectural enterprises of Late Medieval Italy. As creative authorities in Due and Trecento Italy, artists such as Andrea and Giovanni Pisano, Arnolfo di Cambio, and Giotto were the individuals who could best understand and execute the role of monumental buildings as part of political praxis. Trachtenberg makes an analogy between artists such as Giotto and the representative roles (over Florence) given to Robert of Anjou and Charles of Calabria: the high profile individual, in the case of an artist like Giotto, with an aura of cultural and political authority, who could be understood as a supreme master in the matter of architectural representation (282). In Trachtenberg's view, the commune, committee, chapter, or opera, thus ultimately bowed to the authority or prestige of the one.

As a foil to the “medieval” model Trachtenberg describes Alberti's collapsing of construction time “to zero,” because the Renaissance theorist rejected the normative triadic structure of time, funding, and scale. This discussion is anticipated by the monumental and deeply interesting seventh chapter that considers the career of Filippo Brunelleschi in terms of the “Building-in-Time” paradigm. According to this author, Manetti's biography of Brunelleschi was conditioned by an Albertian architect-as-author ideal, a vision that falsified a working process more consistent with the tradition of myopic progression, concatenation, continuous design and retrosynthesis. He thus plants the discussion is “a new pattern of the economy and shaping of architectural desire” that emerged after 1400. The chapter includes extended and detailed discussions of Brunelleschi's reshaping of the east end of the Duomo of Florence and discusses the other commissions for the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the Palazzo di Parte Guelfa, and the Barbedori Chapel in Sta. Felicità as within this reinterpretation of Brunelleschi's working practice.

These chapters bring us to the goal of the book that has been prepared for in its first half. Even though Alberti's structures remained incomplete (and sometimes barely out of the ground) or were reworkings of extant buildings, his aesthetic of reasoned harmony in all parts hovered as an unachievable paradigm for actual building practice. Chapter 9 moves on to the post-Alberti world of the Cinquecento. It serves as a conclusion, while an afterword reflects on current building practice.

The central thesis of the volume, with its insistent drumbeat on “Building-in-Time,” is ultimately a polemical gesture that reinforces Trachtenberg's position on Alberti. However, with the exception of a few isolated periods (Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman imperial buildings, for example), “building-in-time” was (and often still is) normal construction practice. While the identification and clarification of the “four paradigms” is important and “crisps up” our synthetic understanding of building process, the author underestimates the extent to which this was almost always the case, as noted above in relation to Abbot Suger at St.-Denis. What was unique and different was Alberti's ideal vision of the architect and modern modes of building that in some ways infected or intruded upon the capacity of modern scholarship to understand the architectural process in earlier historical periods.

The lure of theory may thus obstruct the practical and possibly mundane reality that prevailed in most building projects prior to our own era. Has it not always been the case that from humble domestic architecture to large-scale monuments, architecture consisted of remodeling, retrofitting, “myopic progression,” and concatenation (Chartres, Canterbury, St. Denis, Cluny, and so forth)? Only a few types of political and economic regimes permitted much else. Were these elements not inherent in almost all historic buildings? The ideal Albertian project and modern building practice are therefore outliers in the history of architecture. In short, “Building-in-Time” is primarily new for those who the study architectural history of the post-Albertian world.

This is an immensely learned and often brilliant book, large in scope and deep in its implications. It is a “life's work,” the culmination of a career in scholarship and teaching. There is much here that is compelling and convincing; even when it does not entirely convince, it is interesting. Trachtenberg's synthetic approach to sites, his focus on the dialectics of process between old and new, and his interest in the dynamic relationships among buildings and within (or between) cities, are important for the disciplines of architectural and urban history. It is marvelous to have these themes discussed across a wide chronological and geographic range.