Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Perpetual Provocateur | Hacker News Reader

Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Perpetual Provocateur

nybooks.com

27 pointsprismatic10 comments

Thanks to the Internet Archive, a volume of Piranesi’s etchings:

https://archive.org/details/McGillLibrary-rbsc_piranesi_oper...

Sheds some light on the Susanna Clark novel of the same name.

I was thinking the same thing.

Oddly Piranesi's name has surfaced a number of times for me over the last few months, Clarke's book being one of them, a volume I ordered when I finished the wonderful Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I'm now tempted to order a book of his prints, particularly the "Imaginary Prisons" [0]. Looking at them, there is a voice in the back of my head whispering "Quake wads!".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carceri_d%27invenzione

I teach drawing. When demonstrating perspective, he is my go to guy. For one of my exerciss ask the students to redraw a Pirenesi as a sci Fi book jacket cover.

I returned many times to the Piranesi exhibition in my town showing, among other things, his imaginary prisons. It took me embarassingly many hours to realize the staircase together with the colums in number XIV forms an impossible object / optical illusion. I wonder how much else I missed.

Marked: https://pasteboard.co/dxNBtyjqas5f.jpg

I never noticed that! Thank you for pointing it out.

Pot calling kettle black in 3,2,1:

"Examining Piranesi’s excited dreams of ancient Rome 170 years later, the young Le Corbusier was appalled: “Porticos, colonnades, and obelisks!!! It is crazy. It is horrible, ugly, and idiotic.”

From what I've read, Le Corbusier was known to make some of the ugliest Brutalist architecture, so I found it somewhat amusing that he thought the same of Piranesi's Rome. Also interesting is that there is no mention of the word "Brutalist" on Le Corbusier's Wikipedia page, even though it is featured in the introductory section of the Brutalist Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture

"The style, as developed by architects such as the Smithsons, Hungarian-born Ernő Goldfinger, and the British firm Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, was partly foreshadowed by the modernist work of other architects such as French-Swiss Le Corbusier, Estonian-American Louis Kahn, German-American Mies van der Rohe, and Finnish Alvar Aalto.[5][13]"

Many individuals seek to avoid association with certain terms- and perhaps Le Corbusier signaled late in life that he didn't want his architectural style to be labeled "Brutalist", and his most fervent supporter/biographers on Wikipedia perhaps took notice.

[5] https://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/features/list/a-loo...

[13] https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/architecture/articles/2016/ma...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit%C3%A9_d'habitation (1952) https://99percentinvisible.org/article/unite-dhabitation-le-...

Obviously there is some subjectivity involved, and perhaps constructing anything after the post-WWII era was probably good for the economy, so I won't completely write him off. But seriously, the amount of exposed concrete in his works are quite drab slabs.

https://archive.ph/l6zo7

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