Fluent Essays

Use your own word to summarize the content and central idea of this article. No less than 300 words. The Sphere and the Labyrinth Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s Manfredo Tafuri translated by Pellegrino dAcierno and Robert Connolly 1 lIThe Wicked Architect: G. B. Piranesi, Heterotopia, and the Voyage Oh, agonizing compulsion toward freedom! terrible and ever-renewed revolution of knowledge! which justifies the insurrection Absolute against Absolute, the insurrection of life against reason-justifying reason when, apparently at variance with itself, it unleashes the absolute of the irrational against the absolute of the rational, justifying it by providing the final assurance that the unleashed irrational forces will once more combine into a value-system. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers In the first edition of Le carceri (The Prisons), Piranesi includes a plate (IX), only slightly modified in succeeding states, that is totally unlike his later works of invention. An enormous oval eye, cut by the upper margins of the page, reveals to the observer the usual repertory of catwalks and hermetic torture devices. The artificiality of the organism is further accen- tuated by the placement of this perspective eye on top of an amibiguous walled structure, in which a central slanting portal is flanked on both sides by arches, through which can be seen a staircase and a low structure, apparently attached to the central portal. At first sight, the plate seems to present a polemical enlargement of the typical baroque device of the perspective telescope, framed by an oval opening: we are reminded of Borrominis II eyes that perforate the portico of the Palazzo Carpegna and the Falconieri crypt in San Giovanni dei Fior- entini, but also of the landscapes painted on oval panels or canvases and of the cosmological themes that, from the time of the Cinquecento, were based upon the reflective properties of convex mirrors. 1 Observing the 26 plate more carefully, one realizes that the network of beams, stairs, and walkways suspended in the air not only projects beyond the foreground of the large eye, but passes through a second oval structure, which emerges from the customary vanishing [sfumarsi] of the image into spirals of smoke and depths of space. But that is not all. The shadow cutting diago- nally across the structure that serves as the base and the presence of the gallows in the left foreground-absent in the first state of the engraving- reveal that what seemed to be an /I exterior is in reality an /I interior: we now realize that the observer himself is immersed in the structure formed by the large ovals arranged in a series. The plate in question can be considered, for several reasons, the key to understanding the entire series of the Carceri. In it, the two poles of Pira- nesis research-the evocation of a primordial strllctllrality connected to the celebration of the Lex romana, of the idea of justice, and the disarticu- lation of the structure evoked-are shown, without any didactic or narra- tive intent, reduced to the encounter between two novel forms.: Ulya Vogt-Goknil can be given credit for having devised a reading of Piranesis Ca rceri that carefully avoids the usual interpretations of a liter- ary nature. 3 His perspective reconstructions of the plan, in particular, tells us a great deal about Piranesis method of composition: Piranesis con1plex organisn1s are seen to have their origins in planimetries \vhose dominating element is the randomness of the episodes, the lawless intertwIning of superstructures, the undermining of the laws of perspective, so as to make nonexistent sequences of structures seem real.-! All of which clearly con- trasts with the constant allusion, present in Piranesis imaginary struc- tures, to the austerity and organicity of Estruscan and Roman architecture. Thus, on one hand, we find a disarticulation of the organisms; on the other, references to highly structured historical precedents. The Piranesian contradictions begin to emerge in all their complexity. In the Carceri, Ulya Vogt-Guoknil sees a potential liberation of form; \ve would say, rather, frorn forn1. The indefinite opening up of spaces, one fitted within the other, their multiplication, their metamorphoses, and their disarticulation polemically supersede the sources of the Carceri itself. The scena per angolo; the scenographic inventions of Juvarra, Bibiena, and Valeriani; Marots Prison of A 111adis itself-all so often cited as direct or indirect precedents of the Carceri 5-are actually used by Piranesi as points of ref- erence with which to open up a fierce polemic. May Sekler has furthered the formal reading of the Carceri, identifying in it a constant disintegration of the coherence of structure that, nonethe- less, has a precise function. It is, in fact, just this disintegration that in- duces the spectator to recompose laboriously the spatial distortions, to reconnect the fragments of a puzzle that proves to be, in the end, unsolva- ble. But it can also be said that the spectator of the Carceri is obliged, more than invited, to participate in the process of mental reconstruction proposed by Piranesi. Sekler herself accurately describes as uncomforta- ble the position the engraver reserves for the observer of his images, with respect to the angle from which the space is represented. 6 Prelude: II Apocalipsis cum Figuris Thl they: rectly mend Ou ment exam cultu: WI distol react cone catioJ comp Arch prete colle< the inser cient built Pant] prov pend o infre engn rathE the 1 CollE (Sel Tt his r tura] ies 0 1740 Wer: ing 1 the j trict: the] Chal Tom can ties cleal The isolation of the elements and their sudden breaking off, just where they should confirm the organic connection of the whole, have been cor- rectly identified by Sekler; for this reason we do not hesitate in reconl- mending her text to the reader. 7 Our principal interest here, however, is to reexamine this hermetic frag- mentation of the architectural ordo, to test its theoretical prenlises, and to examine the perspectives it puts on ll1id-eighteenth-century European culture. What must be made clear from the start is that all this breaking up, distorting, multiplying, and disarranging, apart from the emotional reactions it can elicit, is nothing more than a systematic criticism of the concept of place, carried out by using the instruments of visual communi- cation. It has already been pointed out that, as far back as the perspective compositions of the Prima parte di architetture e prospettive (First Part of Architectures and Perspectives) (1743), Piranesi presents organisms that pretend to have a centrality but that never achieve one. In plate X of that collection, the elliptical courtyard, which seems to constitute the focus of the organism, is seen, in the reconstruction of the plan, to be deliberately inserted as a spiral into the continuum of the columns; while in the II an- cient temple invented and designed in the manner of those which were built in honor of the goddess Vesta, the outer circle winding around the Pantheon, the directrix of the stairway, and the Corinthian colonnade prove to be off-center in relation to one another and dislocated onto inde- pendent rings. 8 One might object that these distortions of perspective are not after all infrequent in the tradition of late-baroque scenography. That Piranesis engravings, however, present to us not merely a set designers whim, but rather a systematic criticism of the concept of /I center, is clearly shown in the Pianta di ampio magnifico Collegio (Plan for a Vast and Magnificent College), inserted in the 1750 editon of the Opere varie di architettura (Selected Architectural Works). 9 The neomannerism of Piranesi5 Collegio has led many to conclude that his research of the early 17505 was influenced by Juvarra and the architec- tural ideals of Le Geay, which John Harris-particularly through the cop- ies of Le Geays projects executed by William Chambers-has dated in the 1740s. More recent studies by Perouse de Montclos, Gilbert Erouart, and Werner Oechslin have cast strong doubt on Harriss hypothesis, conclud- ing that, apart from the collaboration between Le Geay and Piranesi for the Roma moderna distinta per Rioni (Modern ROll1e Divided by Dis- tricts), edited in 1741 by Barbiellini, the fantasies of Le Geay preserved in the Kunsthaus in Zurich, datable at 1757-61, the copies of the album of Chambers (Victoria and Albert Museum, no. 5712, loco 93 B21), and the Tombe (Ton1bs) of 1768 refer to recollections of his Roman sojourn, and can in no way precede Piranesis inventions. IO The fact remains that the ties between Piranesi and the circle of the Academie de France in Rome, clearly demonstrated by the conference and exhibition at the Villa Medici liThe Wicked Archited 27 in 1976, constitute a neo-Sixteenth-century revival, utopian and anticlassi- cal in nature. But beyond a doubt, Piranesis neocinquecentisn10 gre\v out of certain aspects of Juvarras research. It has already been pointed out how Juvarras design for the Duomo of Turin (1729) constitutes a reflection on the pro- liferation of spaces by gemmation that reaches paradoxical heights in Pira- nesis Collegio; 11 moreover, in the Pensiero dedicato a un sogno (Thought dedicated to a Dream) also by Juvarra (dated 25 August 1706), the diago- nal flight of space and the articulated stairway at the right of the page is accompanied by an oval eye, which, like an oneiric telescope fraught with presentiment, frames a landscape dominated by an architectural structure. Similarly, the scenic designs for the Ottoboni Theater at the Cancelleria can be included among the precedents of Piranesis Carceri. Without a doubt, however, Piranesi 5 neocinquecentisnlo has nothing in common with that of Alessandro Galilei. His reference models are neither Della Porta nor Maderno, but rather the most open-minded experimentalists of the Mannerist period. In the cinquecento what was-for Peruzzi, Serlio, and Du Cerceau- utopian in the fullest sense of the word and \vhat represented an avant- garde position, by 1750 had been completely realized. The critical exami- nation of the concept of space, or better, of the determinative value of space, conducted by Hume and Hobbes, now becomes an element in the experiment par excellence of constructed space: architecture.l~ But it must be explained just why Piranesi, followed by Le Geay, Peyre, George Dance, Jr., and John Soane, gave birth to a highly experimental line of research. In the dedication to Nicola Giobbe, prepared for the 1743 edition of his Prima parte de architteture e prospettive, Piranesi ties the theme of a purely ideal restoration of the ancient majesty to the painful statement of the objective and subjective impossibility of a concrete plan. He \vrites: I will not tire you by telling you once again of the uonder I felt in observing the Roman buildings up close, of the absolute perfection of their architectonic parts, the rarity and the i11n11easurable quantity of the l11ar- ble to be found on all sides, or that vast space, once occupied by the Circuses, the Forums and the Inlperial Palaces: I loill tell you only that tho selivi ng, spea ki ng ruins fi II ed 111 Y spi rit 10 ith i111 age s su chas eve nth e masterfully wrought drazoings of the i111 rno rtal Palladio, (l}hich I kept be- fore me at all tinles, could not arouse in nle. It is thus that the idea has come to me to tell the u 70rld of son1e of these buildings: since there is no _hope that an Architect of our times can successfully execute anything sinl- ilar, _be it the fault of Architecture itself, which has fallen from the blessed perfection to which it was brought in the times of the maximum grandeur of the Roman Republic, as well as in those of the all-po\verful Caesars who followed; or whether it be the fault of those \vho should act as pa- trons of this most noble art; the truth is that today we see no buildings as costly as, for example, a Forum of Nerva, an Amphitheatre of Vespasian, a Prelude: II Apocalipsis cum Figuris Palace of Nero; any; no other ( to explain his 0 from Sculpture they have in th from the abuse they themselve The criticisn Apart from an~ dealt elegantly, Rome 14-Piran, no ring the nee works. And on Bertelli, who Sl of Machiavelli tion of an idol publican Florer Nonetheless, and Vanvitelli, direction for tl urban reform rhetoric; we IT of Bottari and attitude at onc positive merit5 pinpointing th But the abo statement of t: the negative exalts the cape as new values) of those who ] selves are able Utopia, the] tion, as the or want to relinq The theme tecture with a or a refusal, a The invention crete the role from actual h cal dimension forth of prese Moreover, scientific pro~ The Wicked AI Palace of Nero; nor have Princes or private citizens appeared to create any; no other option is left to me, or to any other modern Architect, than to explain his own ideas through drawings and in this way to take away from Sculpture and Painting the advantage that, as the great Juvarra said, they have in this respect over Architecture; and to take it away as well from the abuse of those who possess wealth, and who make us believe that they themselves are able to control the operations of Architecture. . . . 13 The criticism aimed at the customs of the Roman milieu is accurate. Apart from any practical economic consideration-Focillon and Scott have dealt elegantly, if not analytically, with the situation of eighteenth-century Rome 14-Piranesi accuses the Roman aristocracy and the authorities of ig- noring the need for an urban reorganization founded on great public works. And on that subject, it is worth noting the shrewd observation by Bertelli, who sees in the dedication to Giobbe a reflection of the readings of Machiavellis Prince, which took place within Bottaris circle: a reflec- tion of an idolization of the continuity of the Italian tradition and of re- publican Florence within the frame of storia patria. 15 Nonetheless, in thanking Giobbe for permitting him to approach Salvi and Vanvitelli, whose works he lists,16 Piranesi seems to indicate a positive direction for the policies of urban planning. Moreover, even the projects of urban reform formulated by Pascoli waver between functionalism and rhetoric; we must remember, too, that the reformist ferment of the circle of Bottari and Cardinal Neri Corsini translates, in architecture, into an attitude at once rigorist, aristocratic, and erudite, capable of embracing the positive merits of a Michelangelo and of a Borromini, but incapable of pinpointing the structural motives of a possible renewal. 17 But the above passage contains something even more important: the statement of the autonomous role of utopiaf We have not yet arrived at -. I the negative utopia of the Careen. For the moment, Piranesi merely exalts the capacity of the imagination to create models, valid in the future as new values, and in the present as immediate contestations of the abuse of those who possess wealth, and who make us believe that they them- selves are able to control the operations o.! Architecture. Utopia, then, is seen as the only possible value, as a positive anticipa- tion, as the only adequate outlet for an intellectual work that does not _ want to relinquish _!he commitment to making projects. The theme of imagination thus enters into the history of modern archi- tecture with all its ideological significance. What might at first seem a lull or a refusal, on the contrary, reveals itself in all its worth as anticipation. The invention, fixed and circulated by means of the etching, renders con- crete the role of utopia, which is to present an alternative that departs froill actual historical conditions, one that pretends to be in a metahistori- cal dimension-but only in order to project into the future the bursting forth of present contradictions. Moreover, the irreplaceable role of the imagination as an instrument of scientific progress, as a source of hypotheses not otherwise formulable, had liThe Wicked Architect 29 30 been repeatedly recognized within the debates of the Enlightenment move- ment. Hampson has pointed out that in a work in vvhich no one would ever have expected a similar statement, La Mettries H0l11111e-l11achine,18 the function of the imagination is praised, as a source of scientific and artistic innovations. And Burke himself, in his Enquiry into . .. the Sub- lime and the Beautiful of 1756, again takes up the theme, affirming that all that which draws the soul into itself, tends to concentrate its strength and render it capable of greater and more vigorous flights of science. 19 But it is important to remember that the sublime, for Burke, is con- nected to the idea of power, of domination. I kno\v nothing, he \vrites, which is sublime vvhich is not connected to the sense of power; this branch proceeds naturally ... from terror, the common origin of all that is sublime, declaring the succession and uniformity of the parts as instru- ments capable of constructing the artificial infinite. And one notes that Diderot, in his Salon of 1767, invited the poets to speak al\vays of eter- nity, of the infinite, of imnlensity, of time, of space, of divinity, of tombs, of hands, of Hell, of a dark sky, of deep seas, of shadowy forests, of thunder, of lightning that splits open the clouds. 20 It is the same celebra- tion of a deformed nature that Chambers, in his Dissertation of 1772, attributed to the Chinese genre. 21 To represent the horrid and the demonic means to give a language to that which in reality eludes a rationalization of a classic type; it means to change the linear concepts of time and space. The dOl11inion evoked by Burke must be exercised exactly on those tvvo uncontrollable dimensions: by making them speak, by representing them, it is possible to make a case for their potential utilization. The power will be that of the ne\v techniques-unnamed, but lying underneath like repressed demands-eapable of controlling the forces that elude the eighteenth-century philosophe. The rhetoric of the infinite and the linguistic disorder-the language of the imaginary-thus constitute invitations to new techniques of domina- tion. The utopianism of Enlightenment architecture is made clear by a _______ lucid acceptance of this new role: archit~cture nO\N tends to formulate hy- potheses, rather than to offer solutions.\ And no one \vill ever claIm that a hypothesis must be completely realized: i Let us examine Piranesis Collegio once again. As in the Carceri, \vhat at first seems to be the subject is later negated and turned into a supple- mentary element. The centrality of the composition, \vith its successive and independent rings, projects outward from the circular space of the grand staircase subdivided into eight flights, which, among the organisms that are in search of their own role \vithin the concentric structures, is, significantly, one of the minor spaces. Actually, as one proceeds gradually from the center toward the periphery of the composition, the dimension of the rooms seems to grow progressively larger, while their geometrical structure becomes increasingly more differentiated and articulated. For ex- ample, look at the succession of loggias and atriums on the perpendicular axes or, even more revealing, the succession of spaces juxtaposed on the Prelude: n Apocalipsis cum Figuris diago: mixti: Wi dimel Acadt mag. ble. than ganti clarj whicl cretl~ In tural giver light herrr the ( sure, vent] cont( It comt infin In whic thesl indi< impt dom nat accic dom diab dent criti Reli reco Goe raIn derc indi vou hav me] Th diagonal axes, terminating-at the bottom half of the sheet-in two mixtilinear rooms with a boldly carved-out perinleter. What differentiates Piranesis design from the abstract designs of great dimension, so customary in the eighteenth-century competitions of the Academy of San Luca,22 is its obvious programmatic character. The I ampio magnifico Collegio is in fact a structure theoretically endlessly expanda- ble. The independence of the parts and their montage obey no other law than that of pure contiguity. The Collegio, then, constitutes a kind of gi- gantic question mark on the meaning of architectural composition: the clarity of the planimetric choice is subtly eroded by the process \vith which the various parts engage in mutual dialogue; the single space se- cretly undermines the laws to which it pretends to subject itself. In this sense, the Carcen serves to heighten the crisis of the architec- tural object expressed in the Collegio and of which Piranesi had already given a metaphorical hint in those masterful representations of the twi- light of the rococo, the four Capricci (Caprices) of 1744-45. Refuting the hermetic-masonic interpretation of Calvesi, Jonathan Scott has interpreted the Capricci as a reflection of the Arcadian games: of that Arcadia, to be sure, to which Piranesi belonged from 17SQ-perhaps through the inter- vention of Bottari-and from which he expected renown and useful contacts. 23 It has already been pointed out that, in the Carceri, the constriction comes not from the absence of space, but from an opening toward the infinite. Inasmuch as Piranesis erudite citations present a whole universe- which includes, as we have seen, the spectator himself-and inasmuch as these citations themselves (as Calvesi and Gavuzzo Stewart have observed) indicate that this universe is both that of republican justice and that of imperial cruelty, we must rondude that the universe of intersubjective domination, of the contrlll sociIll, establishes, together with control of natural subjectivity, the reign of the most absolute coercion. It is not by accident that the Nature invoked by the Enlightenment to legitimate the domination of the bomgeoisie is represented by Piranesi as a corrosive, diabolical, antihuman element. But even this contestation of a transcen- dental and providental onIer of nature is a basic part of Enlightenment criticism. Think, for example, of Humes Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779), in which the Christian Demea recognizes that a perpetual war is waged against all living creatures, or Goethes Werther (1774), where the theme of the necessity and natu- ralness of cruelty is dominant, or the Neveu de Rameau, written by Di- derot between 1761 .. 1774, in which the disharmony between the individual and sociery is seen as inevitable: In nature, all the species de- vour each other; in SOliety, aU the classes devour each other. (And we have deliberately 0ftI1uoW, for the moment, the contrasting and comple- mentary cases of Ra.ssem and Sade.) In return, it is MImtesquieu--often mentioned in reference to Piranesis extolling of the La:ftmuma--who, in his De I esprit des lois, condemns The Wicked AM ., _... 31 32 torture as a convenience of despotic governments, but as contrary to the voice of nature. Thus as early as the Carceri the affirmation of the need for domination clashes with the affirmation of the rights of the subject. The result of the clash-represented epically in plates II and X,24 which depict surreal scenes of torture-is that not men but only things become truly liberated. In particular, in the re-etching of his copperplates, Pira- nesi fills the structures of the Carceri with hermetic objects. The uni- verse of pure power, of the absolute alienation of the subject, is not by chance a mechanical universe. A judgment on the part of Piranesi is implicit here. He sees that mechanical universe, kingdom par excellence of the artificial, as the place where there occurs the definitive loss of primor- dial organicity, of the union between the world of nature and the universe of human institutions. And yet, this very organicity is the subject of the Magni[1cenza ed architettura de Romani (Magnificence and Architecture of the Romans). If the words of the Magni{icenza are to be taken literally, then we must set aside the judgment of Kaufmann, who finds in the 1761 work more advanced theses than those of the successive Parere (Opinions). 25 The de- fense of Roman architecture, against Allan Ramsay, the anonymous Inves- tigator (1755), and against Le Roys Les ruines (1758), is conducted on the basis of naturalism, the principles of fittingness, the criteria of truthful- ness, brought back into favor by Cordemoy and Laugier, but extraneous to the moderate position of Blonde!. 26 Piranesi writes: I believe that in building, beauty consists of giving to the entire work a form which is truly proper and attractive, and in distributing the parts in a clean and tasteful manner, so that there is a lawful agreement among them, and so that a certain natural beauty and ornateness is produced, which holds the gaze of whoever looks at it. But I think that regarding this kind of work, one must consider above all its nature and its purpose, for the reason that since the beauty of boys is different from that of n1en, so in buildings requiring gravity and dignity the ornaments must be used sparingly, inasmuch as this very gravity and dignity serves as their adornment. In /1 charming buildings of a less serious nature [ fabbriche deliziose], however, if a free hand is used in the decoration, no one is likely to object . ... 27 The relationship between Piranesis idea of architecture and Addisons sensism-noted by Wittkower-is thus confirmed. Also as an anticipation of architecture parlante, the indicating of a certain beauty and ornate- ness as pertinent to the /1 nature and the purpose of architecture stands up to historical verification. It is necessary only to distinguish, in the in- fluences generated by Piranesis theories, the line that attempts to recover a new secular and worldly allegorism-eertain works of George Dance, Jr., and John Soane come to mind-from that other line concerned with liber- ating the aggregative or collective qualities of pure geometric forms-from Peyre to Durand, that is. But the passage cited contains something more. Between the architec- Prelude: II Apocalipsis cum Figuris ture of genres to by ~ (Diver: works cenza, The of the dom i manift ety, ready Wh dedica Even 1 ventu: rights methc with or pai from arts a natur subje( whic~ to im Thl the h slant. in th langu norm of stc It is ~ oppo~ In univt firm teent Cam the € poth l allus Tl and: ior t The 33liThe Wicked Arch~ of great public works and private architecture, a clear distinction of --If!ITes is made. Piranesis ambiguous attitude toward the rococo, attested to by some of the plates of the Diverse maniere d adornare i cammini (Diverse Ways of Decorating Chimneypieces) and by his few documented works on the theme of interior decoration,28 is resolved, in the Magnifi- eenza, in the right to free rein in the field of private works. The severity that must be adopted in the celebration of the supremacy of the res publica is compensated for by the regaining of subjective free- dom in /I charming buildings [fabbriche deliziose], in architecture as a manifestation of subjective egoism. The distinction between Civil Soci- ety, that is, the State, and the area belonging to the bourgeois has al- ready been clearly made. What is amazing to the reader of the Magnificenza is an incoherent dedication of faith to the natural laws of architecture: Even though, as Horace has written, painters and poets have the right to venture as far as it may please them, this does not give architects the rights to do things according to their whims: architecture also having its method and its fixed limits, beyond which one cannot go and still work with rectitude. In fact, not even the above-mentioned professors, of poetry or painting, are of an importance which gives them the right to depart from a resemblance to what is real, as they propose; inasmuch as all the arts are an imitation of nature, and he who conforms most closely to nature is considered the most excellent artist of all. And if all the arts are subject to this law, we must certainly not exempt from it architecture, which also springs from what is real, and whose purpose is, as we can see, to imitate mans first manner of dwelling . ... 29 The naturalness of the primordian sources: Piranesi, too, is nostalgic for the happy time of the infancy of humanity. But with a clear ideological slant. The Etruscans and the Egyptians, concerned more with the majestic in their works, rather than with enticing the eye,30 furnish architectural language with a guarantee of legitimacy, permitting it to obey certain norms. The naturalness of the majestic signifies, in this sense, naturalness of state power and the alienation of the subject with regard to this power. It is exactly the theme of the Careen. Naturalness is converted into its opposite, or, rather, is revealed as pure pretext. In the Campo Marzio (The field of Mars) the metaphor of the machine- universe heralded in the Carceri is fully developed and articulated. To con- firm Piranesis relationship to the neomannerist style of …