Michelangelo Sabatino

Director

Location

Chicago

Michelangelo Sabatino trained as an architect, preservationist, and historian. As an educator, academic administrator, and award-winning scholar, Sabatino has shaped architectural discourse and practice in the Americas and beyond. Between 2017–19 Professor Sabatino served as interim dean for the College of Architecture of IIT and held the Rowe Family Endowed Dean Chair. He currently directs the PhD program in architecture and is the inaugural John Vinci Distinguished Research Fellow. Sabatino lectures widely about modern and contemporary architecture, participates in juries, and has served on a number of editorial and not-for-profit organization boards in Europe and the Americas ranging from the Society of Architectural Historians to Docomomo International / US.  

Throughout his career Sabatino has focused new light on larger patterns of design discourse and production during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: his book Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (2011) was translated into Italian and won critical acclaim and multiple awards, including the Society of Architectural Historians’ Alice Davis Hitchcock Award. His recent books include Canada: Modern Architectures in History (with Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, 2016), Avant-Garde in the Cornfields: Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in New Harmony (with Ben Nicholson, 2019), Making Houston Modern: The Life and Architecture of Howard Barnstone (with Barrie Scardino Bradley and Stephen Fox, 2020) and Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929–1975 (with Susan Benjamin, 2020). 

Forthcoming books include Carlo Mollino: Architect and Storyteller (with Napoleone Ferrari, 2021) and The Global Turn: Six Journeys of Architecture and the City, 1945-1989 (with Tom Avermaete, 2021)

www.michelangelo-sabatino.com