Mark Rakatansky is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, and principal of Mark Rakatansky Studio. He is the author of Tectonic Acts of Desire and Doubt (Architectural Association, 2012) and the forthcoming Palladio’s Signifying Media (Officina Libraria, 2025). His designs and writings focus on the performative and transformative aspects of design across a range of modes and time periods, and have appeared in numerous publications including ANY, Assemblage, A+U, Città: Terzo Millennio, Columbia Documents, (Yale) Constructs, Drifting: Architecture and Migrancy, 30 Years of Emerging Voices, Giulio Romano e l’arte del Cinquecento, The Harvard Architecture Review, Log, Perspecta, PRINT, Progressive Architecture, Space, The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century, and Strategies in Architectural Thinking. Grants and Fellowships include the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown, The New York State Council on the Arts, and the Samuel H. Kress Fellowship from The James Marston Fitch Foundation. He is a member of the Scholarly Committee of the Avery Library’s Digital Serlio Project, for which he contributed the essay “How Serlio Haunts Us Still: Wittkower’s Paradoxical Parallax.” His essay “In Search of a Hybrid Antiquity, circa 1516” (Khōrein, 2024) presents selected initial sections from the second chapter of the in-process The Transformations of Giulio Romano, the first chapter of which is published here.