Carlo Lodoli (1690 – October 27, 1761) was an Italian architectural theorist, Franciscan priest, mathematician and teacher, whose work anticipated modernist notions of functionalism and truth to materials.

Together with architects and architectural theorists including Claude Perrault, Abbé Jean-Louis de Cordemoy, Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier, Lodoli articulated a rational architecture which challenged the prevailing Baroque and Rococo styles.

[1] Girolamo Zanetti records that after 20 years of writing Lodoli finished his treatise on architecture but refused to publish it.

It was Andrea Memmo who attempted to do justice to Lodoli's theories in his work Elementi d'architettura lodoliana (1786) published one year before the first edition of the only book bearing Lodoli's name, Apologhi immaginati (1787); a collection remarks and tales, often paradoxical in nature, told to his friends and pupils.

[2] Lodoli spent the years 1739 to 1751 in the office of Padre Generale Commissario di Terra Santa in Venice, here he committed himself to the restoration (1739–43) of the pilgrim's hospice attached to the monastery.