Alicia Imperiale

Dr. Alicia Imperiale is a registered architect, artist, and theorist. Her work harnesses various modes of inquiry and expression to investigate the underlying impact of technology on the arts, society, and culture. Aspects of this research are presented in her book New Flatness: Surface Tension in Digital Architecture (Birkhauser, 2000).

Other publications include “Paolo Soleri and the Teilhard de Chardin Cloister” in Building the Kingdom: Architecture of Religious Communities (Pickering & Chatto, London, 2014); “The Packaged House of Konrad Wachsmann and Walter Gropius” and “Modularity, Prefabrication & Building Manuals in Postwar Italy: Scenes from America” (ACSA, 2012); “Organic Italy? The Troubling Case of Rinaldo Semino Architect” Perspecta 43 (Yale Univeristy/MIT Press, 2010); “Digital Skins: architecture of surface” in SKIN: Surface, Substance and Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002); “Fluid Alliances: Architecture, Politics and Fetish Post 9/11” and “Territories of Protest,” in LOG magazine (2003 and 2008); “Seminal Space: Getting under the Digital Skin,” in RE: SKIN (MIT Press, 2006), “Flatness,” in the monograph Elena Manferdini, (2013) and “Anne Tyng: Dynamic Symmetries,” in Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry (ICA, 2011).

In relation to her work on the politics of the 1960s, Alicia is a co-curator of the exhibit and catalog Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X. (Actar, 2010).

Her dissertation at Princeton University focused on similar issues of computation, fabrication, and scientific concepts used by architects in 1960s postwar Italy. Entitled “Alternate Organics: The aesthetics of experimentation in art, technology & architecture in postwar Italy,” this project repositions “organic architecture” as an investigation of megastructural design and prefabrication modeled on natural models of growth.

She was a Van Alen/John Dinkeloo Visiting Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.