Vittoria Di Palma
Assistant Professor
Modern European architecture and landscape
Ph.D, Columbia University, 1999

Biography
Vittoria Di Palma specializes in modern European architectural history and theory, with a particular concentration on eighteenth-century architecture and landscape.  Her research focuses on connections between landscape and epistemology; ideas of the natural and the artificial; and, more broadly, brings art historical issues to bear upon architectural history, examining, for example, ways in which visuality, aesthetics, and perception inform our understanding of buildings and environments.

After receiving her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1999, she spent 1999-2003 at the Architectural Association, London, where she was co-director of the Histories and Theories of Architecture graduate program.  She then taught at Rice University in Houston, before returning to Columbia to join the faculty in 2004.

Vittoria Di Palma teaches courses on eighteenth-century French architecture and theory, eighteenth-century British landscape theory and design, contemporary landscape, and the undergraduate history of architecture surveys: “Architecture 1750-1890” and “Twentieth-Century Architecture and City Planning”.

Two current book projects explore intersections between the history of science, ideas of nature, aesthetics, and garden design:  Wasteland, a cultural history of desolate, abandoned landscapes that traces attitudes toward dereliction from the seventeenth century to the  post-industrial present; and Fragmented Landscapes, a study of empiricism and aesthetics in eighteenth-century British landscape design. 

Other current and recent projects include Intimate Metropolis (Routledge, 2007), an edited volume analyzing intersections between public and private in the modern city; “Architecture and the Organic Metaphor,” a guest edited issue of the Journal of Architecture; an article on Google Earth, “Virtual Intimacy at a Global Scale”; and an essay on architecture and artifice: “Blurs, Blots, and Clouds: Architecture and the Dissolution of the Surface” (AA Files 54).

Contact Information
905 Schermerhorn Hall
Telephone: (212) 854-4503
Email: vdp1@columbia.edu
Office Hours: On Leave