Foreword by Paolo Portoghesi
Introduction
An Inquiry into Mannerism – Book Organization – Acknowledgements
Part I. Maniera, Mannerism, and Other Manias
1. Maniera vs. Agency
Good and Bad Manners – All about the Author
2. Enigma and Ambiguity
Mechanisms of Production – Seven Forms of Ambiguity
3. Variation and Haecceity
Obsession With Possibilities
4. Imitation and Referentiality
Bringing the Past Back into Play – Reasoned Copy – Non-Referential
5. The Erudite and the Untamed
Revolution – The Wonder and the Monster – Green Renewal
Part II. Adolescent Architecture
6. The Mannerist Phase
From Decorum to Vertigo – Architecture and Conspiracy – Between Refinement and Awkwardness
7. Postmodern Mannerism
The VSB Perspective – Between Ecstasy and Orthodoxy – Academic Architecture
8. Chunky, Bizarre, Sophisticated
The Peter Pan Syndrome
Part III. Mannerism as a Method
9. Voluptuous Stillness
Elasticity, or Adaptability – Disrupted Rationalism
10. Mute Façades, or Theatrical Backdrops
Architecture as Sign
11. Parallel and Continuous Interior
The Black Lodge – Bridge-figures and Other Spatial Structures – Alternative Realities and Atomization
Conclusions
Paolo Portoghesi, The Idea of Mannerism
Biography
Lina Malfona, an architect with a PhD in Architectural Design, is Associate Professor in Architecture at the University of Pisa, where she established the research lab Polit(t)ico. The founder of the firm Malfona Petrini Architecture, she has designed and constructed an archipelago of buildings in the countryside north of Rome, and her work is part of the permanent collection of the MAXXI Museum of Rome. She recently taught as a visiting professor at Cornell University, and pursued her research thanks to a Visiting Scholarship from the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), a Library Grant from the Getty Research Institute and a Fulbright grant at IFA (NYU), among others. Among her books, the most recent ones are: Unfinished. Sul non finito (2022), La condizione manierista (2021), Residentialism. A Suburban Archipelago (2021), Building the Landscape (2018). Her writings have been published in Domus, Log and The Journal of Architecture, among others.
Malfona finds examples of this mannerism in the work of many postmodern and contemporary architects, and through her examination, she offers a way to make sense of the architect’s position in today’s “infinitely expanded field.”
Book Review in the Architectural Record.
