Alicia Imperiale

Alicia Imperiale’s scholarly work examines the interplay between technology and art, architecture, representation, and fabrication in postwar Italian art and architecture. She is the author of New Flatness: Surface Tension in Digital Architecture (Birkhauser, 2000); “Seminal Space: Getting under the Digital Skin,” in RE:SKIN (MIT, 2006); “Organic Italy? The Troubling Case of Rinaldo Semino,” in Perspecta 43 (2010); “Dynamic Symmetries” in Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry (ICA, 2011); “Stupid Little Automata,” in Architecture Culture (2014); “Post 1965 Italy: The Metaprogetto si è no,” in Industries of Architecture (Routledge, 2015); “Organic Architecture as an Open Work,” in Zevi’s Architects: History and Counter-History from Postwar to the End of the 20th Century (Quodlibet, 2018); “An Ineluctable Geometric Character: Luigi Moretti and a prehistory of parametric architecture,” in Log 44, (2018); and “Paolo Soleri’s Teilhard de Chardin Cloister,” in Modern Architecture and Religious Communities: Building the Kingdom (Routledge, 2018). She was co-guest editor of “Perché Italia?, Why Italy?” a special issue of Log 53 (2022). Her book manuscript Organic Architecture as an Open Work: The aesthetics of experimentation in art, technology & architecture in postwar Italy is based upon her dissertation at Princeton University. In 2016-17 she was a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellow, where she conducted research for a new book Machine Consequences: Origins of Output.

Her work has been supported by the American Academy in Rome (AFAAR, Affiliated Fellow of the American Academy in Rome), The Center for the Humanities at Temple University Faculty Fellowship, a Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Research Grant, and a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellowship among others.

She has taught at Yale University, Cornell University, Columbia University, RPI, Temple University, SCI-Arc, and Parsons School of Design. She has conducted week-long special courses at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Studi Umanistici and at the Università di Pisa in Italy.

She is a registered architect in New York State and a member of the American Institute of Architects.

Ph.D., Princeton University, Architectural History & Theory
M.A., Princeton University
M.F.A., Hunter College, City University of New York
B.Arch., Pratt Institute, with Highest Honors