Piranesi: Architect for Dreams
"I need to produce ideas on the grand scale, and I think that if someone asked me to design a new universe, I'd be mad enough to undertake it," wrote young Giovanni Battista Piranesi to a friend. Nobody asked him. In fact, nobody asked him to design any major building at all, though he always signed himself Architetto. Instead, he became known to his contemporaries as "the Rembrandt of Ruins."
Yet in his way, Piranesi did indeed design a universe. For in his etchings of the ruins of Rome he imagined a grandeur that the city itself never achieved. Horace Walpole marveled at his "sublime dreams" and the way "he piles palaces on bridges, and temples on palaces, and scales Heaven with mountains of edifices." Piranesi's etchings sent a generation of leisured Europeans to Rome to see the real things. The richer among them went home and built readymade garden ruins of their own.
Vapor City -Aeron Alfrey
Although this is not the original work of Piranesi, it is inspired by him and is truly mind-blowing.
Piranesi in 3D this site is dedicated to the reconstruction of Piranesi works and there is a very nice computer animation of Piranesi's world in 3D which I, personally recommend checking out :)
No comments:
Post a Comment