“Although much of my work is architectural in character, I do not represent real spaces. Rather, my work has its origins in the spaces I have abandoned – the mood of Rome and the landscape of Texas – and the paintings are of spaces I know that look nothing like what I paint …They are essentially meditations on essences of architecture like enclosure, surface and light.” Born in Italy in 1943, Lauretta Vinciarelli passed away in New York in 2011. Trained as an architect in Rome but a watercolorist by vocation, her works reside in numerous private collections and among the holdings of prominent institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery in Washington DC, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Noted for their luminous qualities of color and light, her depictions of imagined spaces open up a world of enclosed rooms, sweeping landscapes, watery materiality, and atmospheric ephemerality. Describing her work, a noted theorist and critic once said, “They are not architecture exactly, but evidence that it exists.” This book brings together paintings from 1981 onwards in the most complete collection of Vinciarelli’s work to date. It also includes texts from knowledgeable commentators and for the first time presents sketch materials that provide insight into Vinciarelli’s working methodology. Vinciarelli’s technique often operated at the very limits of her medium; sometimes even to the point of failure. In these paintings, color is used as a device for shaping space, with watercolor the chosen medium for its rich portrayal of light and the conceptual simplicity of the act of mixing paste with water. A collaboration between The City College of New York. Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture and Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers

• Introduction by George Ranalli
• Essays by Peter Rowe, Camille Farey, Michael Sorkin and Ida Panicelli
• Edited by Oscar Riera Ojeda

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Contributors Biographies

Lauretta Vinciarelli was an architect and artist who has artwork and drawings in the permanent collections of the National Gallery in Washington, DC; the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Archive of the Biennale of Venice, and the Italian Archive of Drawings, as well as in private collections. She exhibited in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and was represented by Henry Urbach Architecture in New York. Until 2000 she also taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Peter Rowe is Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Design from 1992 to 2004. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 1985 he was Director of the School of Architecture at Rice University in Houston, Texas also serving as Vice President of Rice Center and Environmental Program Director of the Southwest Center for Urban Research. The author of many articles on architecture, urban design, and planning, Rowe is also the author, co-author, or editor of numerous books, most recently including: Building Barcelona: A Second Renaixenca, 2006, Emerging Architectural Territories in East Asian Cities, and Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories, 2014. He was Lauretta Vinciarelli’s husband from 1993.

George Ranalli has been Dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at City College since 1999. He received his Bachelor of Architecture from the Pratt Institute (1972) and Master of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (1974). He was Professor of Architecture at Yale University (1976-1999), and the William Henry Bishop Chaired Professor in Architectural Design (1988-1989). He recently completed his fourth monograph, Saratoga, devoted to his Saratoga Avenue Community Center for the New York City Housing Authority. His architectural and design work has been exhibited in the US and Europe and published internationally in numerous journals.

Michael Sorkin received his architectural training at Harvard and MIT and holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Columbia. He is the princi- pal of the Michael Sorkin Studio in New York City. He is founding president of Terreform, a non-profit organization dedicated to research and urban interven- tion. He is president of the Institute for Urban Design; Distinguished Professor of Architecture and the Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at The City College of New York (where he has taught since 2000), Professor of Urbanism and Director of the Institute of Urbanism at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1993 to 2000), and he has been a professor at numerous schools of architecture. He lectures around the world, is the author of several hundred articles, and is currently a contributing editor at Architectural Record.