Outgrowing Mannerism. On Lina Malfona’s The Mannerist Phase in Architecture

Starting from an assessment of the current state of the architectural profession and its contemporary cultural and theoretical implications, Lina Malfona introduces the book’s main fields of inquiry: manner as authorship, language, and style.1 Through these categories, the central argument emerges: Mannerism is framed as an inevitable phase – almost endowed with a quasi-magical aura – that permeates all forms of artistic expression, finding particularly strong expression in architecture. Mannerism is thus interpreted as both “originary” and “original”: a fertile, ambiguous, and tension-filled formative phase in which the relationship to the past is critically reworked, while the future remains open and indeterminate. As Malfona suggests, it may appear either as a limited episode or a prolonged condition, ultimately becoming a chronic state of theoretical and projective elaboration that operates across both the private and public trajectories of architects.