Christy Anderson

Christy Anderson is an architectural historian with a special interest in the buildings of Renaissance and Baroque Europe. The Guggenheim Fellowship will support her current project on the meanings of architectural materials. Architects worked alongside craftsmen in shaping the form of buildings, drawing on their combined knowledge of the natural world, material technology, and local traditions. A contemporary view understood buildings to be forged from the organic, living matter of the earth—and therefore to retain traces of those vital qualities. Professor Anderson’s research explores the way materials affected not just the appearance of buildings, but also the full range of architectural experiences in the early modern period.

Her interest in the rich traditions of European architecture has shaped a new history of Renaissance Architecture written for Oxford University Press. Looking at buildings across Europe, this book examines the ways in which architecture defined communities as part of the cultural, political, and economic landscape. Other projects include a study of the Danish architecture at the time of King Christian IV (1577-1648).

Professor Anderson has taught at Yale University, the Courtauld Institute, MIT, and currently the University of Toronto. At Yale she received a Morse Faculty Fellowship as well as numerous teaching prizes. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a Kress Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art and later as a Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford University, she studied the annotations made by the English architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652) in his collection of treatises and humanist literature. This work on literacy, architectural language, and the construction of the professional architect appeared in her book Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, 2006).

Christy Anderson lives in Ontario and Western Massachusetts with her husband and son.

Profile photograph by Diana Renelli.