Eleonora Pistis

17th- and 18th-Century European Architecture and Urbanism; Architectural Theory; Antiquarianism
Ph.D., University IUAV of Venice, 2012

Eleonora Pistis was trained as both an architectural historian and an architect at the IUAV in Venice, Italy, where she earned her PhD in the History of Architecture and Urban Planning. Before coming to Columbia she was the Scott Opler Research Fellow in Architectural History at Worcester College, Oxford (2011-2014), and Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America (Spring 2015). From 2015 to 2016, she was Visiting Assistant Professor in Art History at Grinnell College in Iowa, where she taught courses on early modern European architecture and architectural theory. She has also been Michael Sovern Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (Summer 2019), a Getty Scholar (Spring and Summer 2022); a Visiting Scholar at the Norwegian Institute in Rome (Fall 2022); a Scholar-in-Residence at the Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut in Florence (Fall 2022), and a Guest Scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–Max-Planck-Institut (Summer 2024). She has also received fellowships from the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome, the Francis Haskell Memorial Fund, the Paul Mellon Centre in London, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

Her work encompasses seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European architecture and urbanism. Her interests extend across the fluid boundaries of the European Republic of Letters and of the Mediterranean, with a particular focus on Italy, Britain, and France. Pistis enjoys many aspects of architectural history, from studying the management of architectural information inside libraries to exploring practical expertise on building sites. In both her research and her teaching, she applies a range of skills and methods of investigation, from analyses of paper, bindings, and drawings to archival research and from theory to surveys of structures. To her rigorous training in the details of architectural history, she adds frameworks from other fields, especially the histories of knowledge, scientific observation, antiquarianism, books, museums, and cartography.

Pistis has worked extensively on a range of topics: the architecture of institutions devoted to learning (libraries, museums, archives, colleges, and universities); architects as readers; the production, circulation, use, and storage of architectural drawings, prints, and treatises; and studies of ancient Mediterranean architecture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a pivotal period for the future formation of the discipline of archaeology and the institutionalization of the teaching of architecture. Currently, alongside the migration of architectural knowledge, she is exploring the mobility and portability of architecture, both in physical forms and by proxy.

Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford (2024) is Pistis’s first book. Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736) is probably one of the most innovative architects of early eighteenth-century Europe. Hawksmoor’s dream of a new Oxford, though only partially realized between 1708 and 1736, remains one of the most striking examples of the architecture of knowledge from the early modern period. The book analyses this episode of erudite experimentation on paper and in stone. Academics, Hawksmoor (as their chosen architect), and a range of other figures envisaged a network of streets, paths, gates, and squares connecting newly designed colleges and libraries, as well as a university press. Complementing the feverish activity on the various construction sites, the study, collection, and dissemination of architecture knowledge was profoundly reshaped. The book seeks to understand the value of different kinds of knowledge and practical expertise from both inside and outside the university. Building, thinking, and learning, as well as scholars and practitioners, were more tightly intertwined in early eighteenth-century Oxford than ever before.

Pistis’s current book project is provisionally titled History and Its Fragments: Architecture and Antiquarianism in Scipione Maffei’s Republic of Letters. This is a study that investigates how material, visual, and textual fragments—both received and created—were used in the making of architectural knowledge and history within the Republic of Letters between the end of the seventeenth century and the mid-eighteenth century. In doing so, it aims to understand the clash between a way of learning in which physical observation as well as objectivity were considered crucial, and the often physical impossibility of directly observing the object of study—if not through fragments.

Professor Pistis is also working on an edited volume provisionally titled Architecture and Fragmented Pasts.

She will consider graduate applications on any architectural/antiquarian topic or medium from the seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries; she may also co-advice graduate students with her colleagues in the department.

Book

Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford (London/Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2024) [In press]

Edited Book

Architecture and Fragmented Pasts (Leiden: Brill, 2025) [Forthcoming]

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

“Architecture of Museums, Architecture of Books: From the Walls of Museums to the Pages of Musea,” Studi sul Settecento Romano (2024): 143-156 [Forthcoming]

“The Thinkability of Architecture: Piranesi Without Images,” in Piranesi at 300, ed. by M. Bevilacqua and C. Hornsby (Rome: Artemide Edizioni 2023), 84-93 

“Con i piedi per terra: Talman e un frammento colorato,” in Per havermi sognato un gran tesoro, ed. by F. Lenzo (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2021), 137-142

“La biblioteca nella biblioteca: leggere con altri occhi,” Annali di Architettura, 31 (2020): 145-15

“Nicholas Hawksmoor: Creating the Image of a New Oxford,” Annali di Architettura, 26 (2016): 123-138

“ ‘Tironibus pro exemplo’: Henry Aldrich’s Elementa Architecturae and Architectural Education at Oxford,” in Traduire l’architecture: texte et image, un passage vers la création?, ed. by R. Carvais, J-S. Cluzel, and J. Hernu-Bélaud (Paris: Editions Picard, 2015), 145-159

“Storia e architettura: ‘vari frammenti d’antichità’ nell’incontro fra Filippo Juvarra e Scipione Maffei,” in Filippo Juvarra (1678-1736): architetto dei Savoia, architetto in Europa, 2 vols., II, ed. by E. Kieven and C. Ruggero (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2014), 65-77

“Verona,” in Il Settecento: storia dell’architettura nel Veneto, ed. by E. Kieven and S. Pasquali (Venice: Marsilio, 2012), 258-277

“La biblioteca di architettura secondo Scipione Maffei,” in I libri e l’ingegno: Studi sulla biblioteca dell’architetto (XV-XX secolo), ed. by G. Curcio, M. Nobile, and A. Scotti Tosini (Palermo: Edizioni Caracol, 2010), 115-122

“Chiswick House & Gardens,” Casabella, 797 (Jan. 2011): 36-47

“ ‘Farò con la copia’: una raccolta inedita di disegni d’architettura nella Bibliothèque Carré d’Art di Nîmes,” Pegasus: Berliner Beiträge zum Nachleben der Antike, 11 (2009): 93-116

“Catalogo dei disegni,” Pegasus: Berliner Beiträge zum Nachleben der Antike, 11 (2009): 117-207

“ ‘A più nobile simmetria per ornamento, e decoro della Città.’ Progetti e cantiere della Dogana di San Fermo a Verona,” Annali di Architettura, 21 (2009): 167-178