Brown writes:
The City becomes a collection of set-pieces colliding within
a geographical area. Walking through such a city, there is
no way one could predict the character of one of its
neighbourhoods from an inspection of an adjacent area;
everything is unpredictable. The most powerful image of
such a city can be found in the works of Piranesi,
especially in his imaginative illustrations of the Campo
Marzio produced in 1761-2. A product of another
involutionary period: the Baroque. In relating this urban
image to the collapse of the Classical-Baroque ideal in
architecture, Manfredo Tafuri writes:
"Formal invention seems to declare its own primacy,
but the obsessive
reiteration of the inventions reduces the whole
organism to a sort of
gigantic 'useless machine'." (Tafuri, Architecture
and Utopia, page 15).
Tafuri later calls this disaggregated urban form, 'This
colossal piece of bricolage': a state of things which can,
even amongst the immense fertility of its architectural
forms, pervade the City with an unavoidable sense of
ANONYMITY and LOSS.
Lauf writes:
Again, Tafuri's mis-interpretation of Piranesi's
Ichnographia Campi Martii is propagated as architectural
scholarship. The reality: architectural stupidity.
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The City becomes a collection of set-pieces colliding within
a geographical area. Walking through such a city, there is
no way one could predict the character of one of its
neighbourhoods from an inspection of an adjacent area;
everything is unpredictable. The most powerful image of
such a city can be found in the works of Piranesi,
especially in his imaginative illustrations of the Campo
Marzio produced in 1761-2. A product of another
involutionary period: the Baroque. In relating this urban
image to the collapse of the Classical-Baroque ideal in
architecture, Manfredo Tafuri writes:
"Formal invention seems to declare its own primacy,
but the obsessive
reiteration of the inventions reduces the whole
organism to a sort of
gigantic 'useless machine'." (Tafuri, Architecture
and Utopia, page 15).
Tafuri later calls this disaggregated urban form, 'This
colossal piece of bricolage': a state of things which can,
even amongst the immense fertility of its architectural
forms, pervade the City with an unavoidable sense of
ANONYMITY and LOSS.
Lauf writes:
Again, Tafuri's mis-interpretation of Piranesi's
Ichnographia Campi Martii is propagated as architectural
scholarship. The reality: architectural stupidity.
--
The Design-L list for art and architecture, since 1992...
To subscribe, send mailto:design-l-subscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
To signoff, send mailto:design-l-unsubscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Visit archives: http://lists.psu.edu/archives/design-l.html