Research Projects
1. San Francesco a Folloni
In this project, we are collaborating with the friars at the Convento San Francesco a Folloni to produce a complete study of the history of the site. My role as an architectural historian is to attempt to contextualize the medieval complex in relation to Franciscan architecture, and to that end we are working on a visualization of the medieval buildings. My students have been engaged with building from the 1740 plan of the complex made before it was demolished to present a hypothesis on the design of the church and the monastic complex in the Middle Ages.
A student reconstruction of the medieval complex, Spring 2009
- Working with the platea of 1740
2. Mendicant Architecture and the Medieval City
The tentative title of the book is “The Dead Come to Town: Preaching, Burying, and Building in the Medieval City”
The topic is how the friars’ willingness to bury the dead in their churches and cloisters began to shape church space, and in time led to the creation of urban cemeteries in cities such as Pisa and Amalfi.
I am presently applying for grants to write this book next year (2010-11).
The pavement of Sta. Maria in Aracoeli, Rome
3. Kingdom of Sicily, 1130-1420
With Professor William Tronzo at UCSD we are preparing a volume on the Art and Architecture of the Kingdom of Sicily, 1130-1442, as well as a digital catalogue of images of monuments from Southern Italy. The special emphasis of the catalogue will be drawings and paintings in museum and library collections, as well as photographic archives.
4. A new textbook on Gothic Cathedrals
I have a partial text for a new textbook on Gothic architecture which we are going to attempt to integrate into the course in the Spring of 2010. The emphasis of this text is to set the cathedral complex into the frame of the social and topographic fabric of cities, rather than approaching cathedrals as isolated monuments.