My research examines the practices and techniques of early modern architecture, with particular attention to fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy. My work is pioneering in the authority it grants practical, working architectural drawings, renderings that are commonly overlooked by historians of architecture and art due to their utilitarian and workaday qualities. Since Giorgio Vasari, scholars have been conditioned to differentiate “architecture” -- the intellectual, aesthetically pleasing building design of the authorial artist -- from “engineering” -- the more mechanical, and utilitarian design of the (often anonymous) building practitioner.  Yet, ample evidence shows that this theoretical distinction did not align with early modern practice. My research thus lays the foundations for an expanded history, looking beyond anachronistic conceptions of “art,” “architecture,” and “engineering” and examining a broader corpus of the architect’s output. Within this framework, my work directs focus away from the geniuses and singular authors, and in turn, acknowledges a substantially broader, richer tapestry of architectural production that was largely anonymous. In conceiving architecture as a discourse, my research confronts its mainstream interlocuters, individuals who brought to the discussion different qualifications and skills, but whose names were unrecorded. There is a vital need for a more systemic and critical language for assessing anonymous contributions in early modern architecture, and my work assumes this challenge.