This book frames mannerism as an inescapable stage in the creative process. The mannerist phase is usually an adolescent stage of language, preceding the consolidation of thought. It is that period, as fertile as it is anguished, in which each author engages in a dialogue with his or her past, reinterpreting or completely transforming it. The mannerist phase is that period when architects design spaces, not yet knowing what it means to design places.

The mannerist condition can be short-lived or protracted until it becomes systemic. In all cases, it is a period of research experienced by architects who are also intellectuals, that is, architects who operate between the practice of making and the elaboration of a personal design philosophy, within a perspective in which history, theory and criticism are intertwined. In this sense, the mannerist condition can also be defined as the style of the academic thought.

The book explores the work of many authors, analyzing their relationship to history and how they managed to emerge from its shadow. Of interest to academics, scholars and students exploring the theory of architecture, this book offers an unconventional, transtemporal reading of mannerism, where facts, events, and images belonging to different times and spaces are juxtaposed to generate a series of temporal paradoxes.

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, La condizione manierista (2021), Residentialism. A Suburban Archipelago (2021), Building the Landscape (2018), Tra Roma e il mare (2014) and Il tracciato urbano (2012). Her writings have been published in Domus, Log, and The Journal of Architecture, among others.