Liane Lefaivre (Ph.D.) is a Research Associate in the multidisciplinary Design Knowledge Systems Group in the Department of Architecture at the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands. Her work is devoted to architectural culture and architectural criticism in the framework of cognitive history, architectural history, creativity, the cognitive/conceptual aspects of the modern in Western culture. Her work relates to two periods: early modern (Renaissance to the end of the 18th century), and the post-World War II. Her articles have appeared in Archithese, Korean Architect, A+U, Wonen/TABK, the magazine of the Architecture School of Tsinghua University in Beijing, Arquitectura & Vivienda, Forum, Design Book Review, Casabella, AMC (Architecture, Mouvement, Continuite), La revue du dix-huitieme siecle, Daedalos, A.A.Files, the Harvard Architecture Review, the Harvard Design Magazine, the New Village Journal and Pin-Up. She has lectured at Columbia University, MIT, Princeton University, the National Gallery in Washington, DC, The University of California at Berkeley, the Politecnico of Milan, the University of La Sapienza in Rome, the Technion in Haifa and Betzalel Academy in Jerusalem.

Among the books she has published are a documentary history of the humanist tradition in architecture from the early Renaissance to the end of the 18th century, entitled The Origins of Modern Architecture (in Dutch, De Oorsprong van de moderne architectuur, Nijmegen, SUN: 1984, now in its second printing); Architectural Thinking (Het architectonisch denken, Nijmegen,SUN: 1991). She has also published Classical Architecture: The Poetics of Order (Cambridge, MA.,The MIT Press: 1986. Now in its 7th printing and translated into French, Spanish, German and Japanese). All were carried out in collaboration with Alex Tzonis.

Her Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-Configuring the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA., The M.I.T. Press: 1997) won three awards: an Association of American University Publishers Award (in the category of illustrated books), the Association of American Publishers Award for Best New Scholarly/Professional Book of 1997 (for literature) and the A.I.A. Annual Award for Best Book (in history) for 1997. She is also the editor of the Electronic Hypnerotomachia, accessible from the home page of the DKS group at the TUDelft and of the M.I.T. Press.

In relation to contemporary criticism and theory, she introduced the notion of Dirty Realism into architecture and collaborated with Alex Tzonis in introducing the concept of Populism, Critical Regionalism and Skin Rigorism, and has published and lectured widely on all. Among her recent books are Architecture in North America since 1960 (Boston, Little, Brown; London, Thames and Hudson: 1995), Architecture in Europe since 1968 (London, Thames and Hudson; New York, Rizzoli: 1993) now in paperback (1997), Movement and Structure in the Work of Santiago Calatrava (Basel, Birkhauser: 1996), again, in collaboration with Alex Tzonis. They are completing Architecture since the Second World War: Rethinking the Modern (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books:1999).