ALEXANDER TZONIS is Professor of Architectural Theory at the TUDelft and director of Design Knowledge Systems Research Center. Among his books are Towards a Non-Oppressive Environment (I-Press/MIT Press, 1972) and Hermes and the Golden Thinking Machine (Bradford/MIT Press, 1990). He has also co-authored several books with Liane Lefaivre, including Classical Architecture (MIT Press, 1986) and the AIA prize-winning Architecture in Europe since 1968 (Thames Hudson, 1992).
LIANE LEFAIVRE is a researcher at the DKS Center at the TUDelft. She has authored prize-winning scholarly books on the Renaissance and Enlightenment, among them the AIA award-winning Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (MIT Press, 1997). She is a contributing editor of Architecture magazine in New York and has written widely on contemporary architecture, in particular on dirty realism.
BRUNO STAGNO, a practising architect in San Jose, Costa Rica, studies in Santiage, Chile and Paris and is one of the most eminent architects of South America today. He is Director of the Institute for Tropical Architecture, San Jose. His work has been published in Bruno Stagno: An Architect in the Tropics (Asia Design Forum Publications, 1999). It was Stagno's initiative to invite leading architects from the tropical region to enter a discussion that served as a point of departure of the present book. In 1997 he was given the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development Award.