The course aims to provide students with the knowledge and tools for the interpretation and critical analysis of Italian and European architecture from the fifteenth century to the modern era through the study of general evolutionary processes and fundamental aspects concerning cultural movements, individual personalities, and works. In this context, the evolution and transformation of architectural language will be analyzed in relation to the historical-artistic, technical, and urban culture of the investigated period. Some final digressions on the influence of the principles and currents exposed in contemporary architecture will be presented at the end of the course.

The course program will consist of a broad debate concerning the critical study of architectural works, examined within their cultural context with reference to causes, techniques, built reality, and ultimately meanings. The main topics covered will include:

The Mature Renaissance
• Donato Bramante: the painter/architect. Raffaello Sanzio, Baldassare Peruzzi, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, and Giulio Romano.
• Michelangelo Buonarroti: the sculptor/architect. Verona and Venice: Sansovino, Sanmicheli, and Andrea Palladio.
• Iacopo Barozzi, known as Vignola, and Sebastiano Serlio, and the treatise writers of the sixteenth century.

The Baroque Age. Rhetoric and patronage.
• Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini, and Pietro da Cortona.
• Classicism, neobaroque, and rococo in Italy. Classicism, Baroque, and Rococo in the rest of Europe.

Origins and development of Neoclassicism in the eighteenth century.
• The experience of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, William Chambers, Robert Adam, George Dance the Younger, Giacomo Quarenghi, John Soane.
• The origins of Neoclassicism in France: Boullée and Ledoux.

The modern movement and urban planning.
• From building to city.
• Theories and projects of modern urban planning.

From modernism to rationalism (brief overview).
• Frank L. Wright and Alvar Aalto's organic architecture. The De Stijl movement in the Netherlands.
• Le Corbusier's "five points" in France. Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany.

The history of thought and theories on architecture in the 1920s (brief overview).
• The Bauhaus, the Stuttgart exhibition, and the Weissenhof.
• Italian rationalism. The "Group 7" and the MIAR. The contribution of Giuseppe Terragni. The works of Giovanni Michelucci and Giuseppe Pagano. The International Style in the United States.

Post-modernism and towards contemporaneity (brief overview).
• Brutalism of the 1970s. Post-modernism by Philip Johnson and Aldo Rossi.
• From modern to contemporary: Oscar Niemeyer, James Stirling, Renzo Piano.
• Deconstructivism by Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid.

The teaching material prepared by the lecturer in addition to recommended textbooks (such as for instance slides, lecture notes, exercises, bibliography) and communications from the lecturer specific to the course can be found inside the Moodle platform › blended.uniurb.it