Biography

Michelangelo Sabatino is a publicly engaged architectural historian, curator, and preservationist whose research and writing focuses primarily on modern architecture and the built environment. He is Professor of Architectural History and Heritage at IIT’s College of Architecture where he directs the PhD program and is the inaugural John Vinci Distinguished Research Fellow. Sabatino’s first book, Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (2011), won multiple awards, including the Society of Architectural Historians’ Alice Davis Hitchcock Award. Since arriving in Chicago in 2014, Sabatino co-authored Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929–1975 (2020) and most recently completed two books pertaining to Mies and IIT: The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture (2024) and Mies in His Own Words: Complete Writings, Speeches, Interviews (2024).

Project Summary

The modern pavilion—by architects such as Mies van der Rohe and celebrated by historians as evidence of tradition-defying design—has a far more complex and contradictory history than has thus far been revealed. Its complexity lies in early modern ideas about the building type found in architectural and art-related sources as well as in garden and landscape architecture. Seemingly unlikely precedents such as belvederes, terraces, and promontories are at the heart of the Renaissance’s contribution to the modern pavilion. Part of the pavilion’s ‘new’ (i.e. twentieth-century) spatial and material qualities is its ability to encourage and facilitate the primordial act of looking out. While in many instances, the abundant use of glass in modern pavilions facilitates looking out, literal transparency is not the most compelling dimension of the pavilion experience. The new book on the modern pavilion seeks to rewrite the history of modern architecture’s contribution to modernity by unpacking the role that looking out, as a corporal and visual experience, has played. By studying Renaissance architectural and garden treatises available at I Tatti, Sabatino seeks to understand better how the pavilion, whether located in a pastoral setting (garden, park, etc.) or urban context, helped transform the modern gaze. By interrogating the work and ideas of artists, architects, and landscape architects, the research will explore how the modern pavilion led to transformative visual, tactile, and spatial experiences for its inhabitants.