Invited by ISI Professor and Architect Franco Pisani, Prof. J. Foote presented the lecture Well-tempered building: Michelangelo’s full-size drawing practices at San Lorenzo for the ISI Architecture Design Studio students. This talk offers a framework for understanding how ‘well-temperedness’ may frame decisions in the critical period when a project unfolds between an architect’s drawing and the building site. We question the present migration toward increasingly prescriptive building procedures inherent in such terms as the “digital master-builder” or “digital craft”. According to Professor Foote, many of these recent developments, while offering promise for the re-connection of the architect to the building site, often reinforce current barriers between ‘design’ and ‘build’ as much as they seek to reverse their separation. Through a micro-historical reading of Michelangelo’s use of architectural template drawings on the San Lorenzo building site, it is possible to foreground the practice of tempering as a way to reconnect ‘design’ and ‘build’. In this way, Michelangelo’s template-making practices on the building site are discussed in terms of his well-known sculptural practices of emergent form. The talk concluded with an assertion that Michelangelo’s use of templates as instruments for intervention amidst an unstable building site serves as a marvelous exemplar for tempering as a method for materializing the poetic image through disciplined practice. Foote posits that through small changes enacted by architects in designs and an active presence in the progression of a build, an architect will be able to reclaim his position as “master-builder” in the future.

Jonathan Foote is the Graduate Program Director at the School of Architecture for Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, USA. He received his PhD from Virginia Polytechnic Institute; his undergraduate degree in History from Indiana University and his M.Arch from Virginia Tech in 2001. He then joined the faculty at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech (WAAC) in the fall of 2004. Professor Foote has also taught for the Architecture Department, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, during his time at WAAC.