Lauretta Vinciarelli

Vinciarelli's art is part of many private collections and cultural institutions, including the International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA) at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, Columbia University's Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Art Institute of Chicago. A large body of work by Vinciarelli, including the luminous Orange Sound series is held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A 2015 exhibition at MAXXI, the National Museum for the Twentieth Century Arts in Rome, dedicated to architecture included a group of Vinciarelli's abstract watercolors donated by the artist’s family.

Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943 – August 3, 2011) was an artist, architect, and professor of architecture at the collegiate level.

About her artwork, Vinciarelli said, "The architectural space I have painted since 1987 does not portray solutions to specific demands of use, it is not the space of a project; at least not a project as the rational answer to a program."

During the 1980s, Vinciarelli worked with Minimalist artist Donald Judd in New York City and in the American Southwest, especially in Marfa, Texas. Marfa quickly became a research site for theoretical postmodern architectural proposals such as Marfa II Project, Marfa, 1978 and Untitled Drawings 1981. Vinciarelli used a rigorously inductive methodology to define and integrate fundamental architecture and design components. On the topic of the Marfa "hangar and courthouse" study, Vinciarelli stated her aim was "to form a fabric." In 1984, Vinciarelli and Judd entered the winning entry for the Kennedy Square Providence, Rhode Island, competition. Their project drew upon Vinciarelli's earlier work, including her landscape architecture proposal of 1977 for a system of urban gardens, commissioned by the Regional Administration of Apulia, in southern Italy. In 1986, Vinciarelli was awarded an Artists Fellowship in Architecture by the New York Foundation for the Arts.

From the early 1980s until the end of her life, Vinciarelli created evanescent watercolor-and-ink studies of hypothetical architectural spaces. Her work has been analyzed by scholars and critics, including Ada Louise Huxtable and K. Michael Hays in Not Architecture But Evidence That It Exists. Vinciarelli belonged to an esteemed and influential group of contemporary paper architects, which included, among others, Raimund Abraham, John Hejduk, Gaetano Pesce, Lebbeus Woods, and Aldo Rossi. Vinciarelli created powerful and inspiring, hand-crafted imagery of topological space, on paper, which is a distillation of traditional, historical, and imaginal references. Her use of water elements extend the essence of architecture through transparency and reflection.

Born in Arbe, Italy, Lauretta Vinciarelli was the daughter of Alberto and Annunciata Cencioni Vinciarelli. The family moved to Rome where she grew up, and her father was an organist in the St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican, and her mother was a teacher. Vinciarelli studied architecture at Sapienza University of Rome, and was accepted to the Ordine degli Architetti di Roma e del Lazio (the Italian Board of Architects). She practiced architecture in Rome before emigrating to the U.S. in 1968. In 1993, she married Peter Rowe, a distinguished professor of architecture at Harvard University.