Dr. Cara Rachele

Cara Rachele (she/her) teaches architectural history and theory at the chair of Prof. Dr. Maarten Delbeke at the Institut for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich. She also coordinates the gta Doctoral Program. 

Dr. Rachele is a specialist in early modern Italian art and architecture, with a secondary interest in the nineteenth century. Her research focuses on representation and works on paper – disegno and drawing practice more broadly – and the development of architectural practice and education. She is the co-author, together with Dario Donetti, of Building with Paper: The Materiality of Renaissance Architectural Drawings (2021). Her forthcoming monograph investigates the emergence of the artist-architect in early sixteenth-century Italy through an exploration of the development of drawing practice in Florence and Rome. It sheds new light on the importance of drawing for architecture, as well as disegno as a unifying theoretical framework for artistic creation. In the early stages is a second project, provisionally titled “Fear of Falling: Unstable Architectures in Early Modern Italy”, which examines anxieties of structural collapse in early modern artistic discourse.

Cara has been a fellow of the Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Florence), the Drawing Institute of the Morgan Library & Museum (New York), the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Institut, and the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe of the Uffizi Museums (Florence), among others. Between 2023-2025, she was guest professor in early modern architectural history at EPFL Lausanne. She holds a BA in architecture from Columbia University and a PhD in architectural history from Harvard University.