Includes bibliographical references and index.

In modern oblivion: rethinking architecture, time, and history -- Regimes of time consciousness in architectural lifeworlds -- Premodern regimes of architecture and time -- Building-in-time in "pre-Albertian" Italy -- The art of building in time: Florentine practice -- Reflections of practice aggrandizement and authority in building-in-time -- Cohabiting temporalities of architectural practice in Brunelleschi -- Alberti and Brunelleschi -- Renaissance temporalities after Alberti -- Afterword: crypto-Albertianism and the oblivion of building-in-time.

In the pre-modern age in Europe, the architect built not merely with imagination, bricks and mortar, but with time, using vast quantities of duration as the means to erect monumental buildings that otherwise would have been impossible to achieve. Virtually all the great cathedrals of France and the rest of Europe were built by this deliberate practice, here given the name "Building-in-Time". It places an entirely new light on the major works of pre-modern Italy, from the Pisa cathedral group to the cathedrals of Milan, Venice and Siena, and from the monuments of fourteenth-century Florence to the new St Peter's. Even as this temporal regime was flourishing, the fifteenth-century Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti proposed a new one for architecture, in which time would ideally be excluded from the making of architecture ("Building-outside-Time"). Planning and building, which had always formed one fluid, imbricated process, were to be sharply divided, and the change that always came with time was to be excluded from architectural making.