Future Past

Review of La actualidad de Alberti by Arnoldo Rivkin, Puente Editores, Barcelona, 2025

Abstract

Futuro Anterior is a review of Arnoldo Rivkin’s book La actualidad de Alberti (The Relevance of Alberti Today), which reactivates Leon Battista Alberti’s architectural theory in order to address contemporary challenges. The text highlights how Rivkin reinterprets Alberti’s six foundational concepts — regio, area, partitio, paries, tectum, and apertio — through a critical and forward-looking lens. The first part of the book focuses on regio and area, tracing a genealogy that links landscape architecture, the aesthetics of the sublime, and today’s environmental crisis. The second part explores partitio, investigating its potential to rethink the house-city relationship and urban form, from Choisy to Koolhaas. Rivkin transforms these notions into analytical tools capable of connecting architecture to ecological, territorial, and urban dimensions, proposing that Alberti’s thought provides a meaningful framework for contemporary architectural discourse. Composed of short, scholarly essays, the book unfolds as a critical archaeology of projective thought, positioning Alberti as a forerunner of an expanded architecture — one that can engage with both domestic fragments and planetary scale. Ultimately, Rivkin affirms Alberti’s untimely relevance as a resource for rethinking architecture in light of today’s global and environmental challenges.