Architectural historian, critic Mark Jarzombek to lecture at Syracuse Architecture

Mark Jarzombek, associate dean and professor of the history and theory of architecture at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, will speak at the Syracuse University School of Architecture on Tuesday, Oct. 20, at 5 p.m. in Slocum Hall Auditorium. His lecture, “Framing the Global,” is free and open to the public.

Jarzombek is well known for his extensive knowledge on a range of historical topics, from the Renaissance to the modern, and his work on 19th- and 20th-century aesthetics.

Jarzombek’s first book, “On Leon Battista Alberti, His Literary and Aesthetic Theories” (MIT Press), inaugurated an important reinterpretation of the noted Renaissance humanist. His second book, “The Psychologizing of Modernity, Art, Architecture and History” (Cambridge University Press, 2000), historicized a complex set of issues around the question of subjectivity and modernity.

Jarzombek has received numerous awards for his research, as well as for the various international conferences that he has organized. He has published in journals including the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Assemblage, and Renaissance Studies. He published a textbook, “A Global History of Architecture” (Wiley Press, 2006), with co-author Vikram Prakash and the noted illustrator Francis D.K. Ching. Jarzombek is currently working on a set of essays on architecture and modernity.

Jarzombek, who was an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago, received his architectural training from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich (1980) and his Ph.D. from MIT (1986). He was a postdoctoral resident fellow at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Humanities and Art, Santa Monica, Calif., in 1986, and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., in 1993. In 2002, he was a resident fellow at the Canadian Center for Architecture.