Chronology of Intended Works

Bonne soirée! Voici un petit coup de Rome. Apprecier.

• 1rst cent. BC -Historian Sallust built his gardens

• 117 -Hadrian crowned emperor of Rome

• 130 -Hadrian builds his villa at Tifoli in 120, completed later in the 130s

• 135 -Temple of Venus and Roma begins construction 121 & inaugurated in 135

• 126 -Pantheon is rededicated in 126 by Hadrian

• 138 -Hadrian dies in 138

• 139 -Mausoleum of Hadrian completed in 139

  • Later turned to a fortress by Pope Nicholas III in 1500

• 1461 -Hadrians Villa at Tifoli excavated and rediscovered in 1461 reinvigorating classical understandings of architecture

• 1475 -Michelangelo born

• 1523-1576 -Laurentian Library Michelangelo Pope Clement VII

• 1546 -Piazza di Campidoglio Michelangelo

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• 1560 -Pirro Ligorio publishes his toppgraphical map of Hadrians Villa at Tifolo

• 1570 -Palladio publishes his treatise on architecture.

• Bernini born 1598

• Borromini born 1599

• 1623-1634 -Saint Peters Bascillica by Bernini with working Borromini.

• 1626-1628 -Saint Peters Royal Staircase

• 1627-1633 -Bernini designs Pallazo Barberini

• 1634 -Borromini completes San Carlo Alla Quatro Fontane

• 1637 -Borromini Oratorio dei Filippini (Oratory of St. Philip Neri) 1650; complex finished.

• 1642 -The Palazzo di Propaganda Fide designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini later took over.

• 1642-1660 Borromini Sant’Ivo all a Sapienza

• 1646-1650 -San Giovanni in Laterano (Restoration) Borromini

• 1651 Piazza Navona Fountain of the Four Rivers Borromini loses then Bernini as victor

• 1650-1660 -Palazzo Loduvisi Bernini, restored from the original Gardens of Sallust in 1BC

• 1653-1657 -Borromini involved in Sant'Agnese in Agone

• 1660-1665 -Borromini Cappella dei re Magi

• 1664 -Competition for the design of the east facade of Le Louvre begins

  • Bernini proposed three separate schemes, all rejected.\

• 1667 -Bernini completes Saint Peters square with Pope Alexander VII

• 1667 August -Borromini commits supuku.

• 1678 -Tomb of Pope Alexander VII

• 1680 -Bernini dies

• 1683 -Claude Perrault publishes his Ordonnance.

• 1709 | Ruins of the ancient city of Herculaneum in Naples are discovered and inspected

• 1710 | Designs for the lavish theater in Cancelleria by Juvarra will inspire Piranesi

• October 4th 1720 | Piranesi is born.

• 1724 | Excavations at Hadrians Villa are revitalized with much more rigor

• 1730 | Marco Ricci publishes Varia Marci Ricci pictoris prestantissimi experimenta which will inspire fantastical ideas in Piranesi

• 1735 | Piranesi is apprenticed by his uncle an architect and hydraulics engineer where he works and studies for a number of years with transfers to various other studios as he gains knowledge.

• 1740 | Piranesi moves to Rome as a draftsman in the retenue of a Venetian ambassador

• 1741 | Piranesi collaborates with French artists at the Academie de France in Rome creating a series of plates as guidebooks for the city.

• 1743 | Publishes his first independent production engaged with ideas of imaginary buildings having massive scale and monumentality.

• 1747 | Piranesi spent years traveling Italy. After visits to Naples and substantial stay in his hometown, Venice, he returns to Rome to produce his four plates of the Grotteschi.

• 1748 | Piranesi publishes his first independent set of vedute. Nolli unveils his definitive map of Rome. Piranesi contributed vignettes for a reduced version. Excavations at Pompeii begin.

• 1752 | Piranesi marries the daughter of a princes gardner; Angelica Pasquini

• 1753 | Laugier publishes L’Essai sur L'Architecture opening the Graeco-Roman ideal debate. Piranesi publishes a book providing novel examples of Roman decorations useful for painters, sculptors and architects.

• 1755 | Piranesi’s daughter is born, Laura, she will aid in the print shop printing her fathers works

• 1758 | Piranesi’s first son is born, Francesco, he will collaborate with his father in later works. Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grece is published as the first evidence in support of Greek architectural superiority. Pope Clement XIII is elected and will become Piranesi’s chief patron.

• 1760 | Piranesi creates the winning design for Blackfriars bridge with significant impact from his archaeological background.

• 1761 | Piranesi dedicates a publication to Pope Clement XII in support of Roman cultural architectural origins as he joins the Graeco-Roman debate.

• 1762 | Piranesi publishes further architecture folios including his immensely influential Il Campo Marzio dell’Antica Roma highlighting the originality of Roman urban design.

• 1770 | Piranesi explores the Pompeii excavation sites.

• 1778 |Piranesi investigates and sketches the Greek Temples at Paestum with his son and fellow architects. Piranesi dies in November.

• 1949 Monument at the Cave Ardeatine

I will study how architectural drawing as an analytical and theoretical tool compares to the real applications of built architectural artifacts in Rome.

I will compare measured drawings of built structures by Bernini & Borromini as well as later drawings by Piranesi to dissect the political, cultural and personal causalities and effects of each mode of artistic expression.

Act One:

Detailed and measured drawing of built works. List Chronology of necessary artifacts that can be measured in person with proper tools. Schematic and construction documentation will be produced for many aspects of these structures.

Continued research on historical applications of building materials and intetionality for built structures listed in the chronology of works.

A drawn bibliographic library of chronologically listed works will be outfitted as a single publication of findings.

Act Two:

A rigorous and detailed copying of original drawings for building will occur.

Speculative drawing which arrived in no built works will be laboriously studied by overlaying drawings to understand the tectonic nature of these drawing artifacts individual works and as part of a composed era of creation.

Act Three:

The simmering discoveries from the first act and the second act will be dissected and if necessary abstracted for the representation of architecture. Act Three will combine these into the production of three speculative drawings of architecture as a personal impression of the imagery, rigor, beauty, stability and inventiveness that exist in the infinite iterations of the school of Roman & Italian Classicism. .

Narrative Etymologies:

The world is a fractured, humorous, tragic, exemplary and infinite mixture of rebutting perspectives. I find that understanding it all is as much an impossibility as equally as there will be reactions and interactions that have clear reciprocal outcomes. The baroque period of architecture in Rome was a much fractured, misunderstood, rapidly urbanizing, intersection of cultures, politics, ideas, aesthetics and artistic processes. The baroque has remained a puzzling expression of architecture. It expresses the vulgar, the explicit, the lustful and satirical. At times it was absurd to the point of humor thanks to the disassociation with accepted routines and a break down of normal social conventions that had marked the previous high ordered traditions of the Renaissance.

I'd like to understand the rich textured folds of baroque "perfections". There is a degree of democratization that occurs in the sensation of spectating a baroque building which elicits excitement, uncertainty, rigorous reflections of the past while entertaining something deliciously novel in the cascading forms of buildings which carry the name baroque. Somehow the slightest accentuations of vulgarity, irregularity and perhaps even whimsy - while still being tied to an ordered calm - manage to tickle the senses in way that few other representations of architecture can equate.

Beyond even the architecture of the time which required immense wealth and at times dizzying opulence - the architectural drawings produced in the 16th, 17th and 18th century have the capacity to allude even further to a sentiment toward magnificent conceptions of impossible architectures like the endless cavernous under ground passageways of Piranesi and the fantastical depictions by Borromini.

It is clear that the increased awareness of history leading up to the 18th century brought to surface a frothed up, wild impression of the depth of architectural notoriety - notably by the endless excavations that continued throughout Italian states and into the rest of Europe exposing a true past.

In my own awareness of the rich, textured, and culturally significant architectural history of Rome, I find much connective tissue that is relevant in my own context to the endless stream of new information which became available to architects during the high baroque periods and seems absurdly available to architects today. I intend to make action of the infinite folding architectural hillside that occupies Rome so that I can better understand my own hillside.

The term baroque seems opaque still somehow. It has occupied a method in its name, as a dissected spirit which lives in architecture. It represents a closure of some unnamed sentiments in popular culture. Within certain dynastic echos of Roman architecture there are always a beginning, middle and end. I intend to tie together the mutual endings of various political, economic, cultural and physical perceptions of Rome. There is a thread relating a series of drawings that employ an intention toward rigorous perspective drawings as well as measured and ordered plans and elevations. The simple "signage of baroque" on an architecture produce powerful images in their own right. With their many faced reductions, oscillations and expressions of classical architecture the viewer is not without choice! There are many dizzying, wonderful facades and plan compositions which are enough to enslave the senses toward confusion, apathy, ridicule, surprise, and joy. Eventually an introspective bargaining of the soul occurs which questions both acceptance and rejection of the existence of the montage of feelings that have washed over oneself. Perhaps all of Rome itself, is a meandering Baroque composition of sensory pleasure.

Mannerism

Baroque

Heterotopia

Everything arranged to let the spectators wander about ceaselessly and still drowning in visual richness.

Baroque as the greatest philanthropic expression of beauty in architecture. Democratization of the endless vigor and complexity of architecture that is possible for not only private wealth, but more neatly, the common man to be stimulated across endless folds of building and street and sculpture until the eventual reflection has no choice but to turn inward toward the equally endless beauty and curious vulgarity of the human form itself.

Essential questions of who are humans most afraid of? Themselves.

The baroque as a concept challenges the insanity of western critical reasoning to name, call into existence and describe reality.

baroque rhetoric as a parody of itself

Baroque as a reoccurring “sign of history”

Claude Perrault

Perrault was concerned with nothing less than the definition and imple-

mentation of a new kind of architectural theory, a theory that challenged the nature

of the discourse that had emerged in architectural treatises from Vitruvius to the

mid-seventeenth century. It is well known that the discipline had been "promoted"

to the sphere of the liberal—that is, "mathematical"—arts during the Renaissance.3

Unlike that of his medieval predecessor, the Renaissance architect's task was the conception of the lineamenti, or overall geometric figure, of the architectural work. Architecture thereby became endowed with a specific theory, which was, nevertheless, a nonspecialized field of endeavor in the modern sense. It belonged to a universe of discourse that was founded on a totalistic understanding of reality, derived from myth and philosophy; its content was meaningless apart from the traditional understanding of a hierarchical and living cosmos (physis) that the Renaissance had inherited from antiquity.4

Such theory fulfilled the important role of elucidating the orders and meanings of the cosmos that were clearly embodied in the built world. Perrault's concern was to place architecture, already well established within the European tradition of disegno (design as a liberal art), into the framework of the new scientific mentality inaugurated by Galileo and Rene Descartes. To found his endeavor on firm ground, he thought it necessary to ex-

amine the oldest surviving architecture treatise. He was convinced that a rigorous

scholarly examination of this treatise, so close to the origins of the discipline, could reveal fallacies and misunderstandings about the nature of architectural theory as it was understood in his time.

Aurea Mediocritas

Achieving a virtuous middle ground between two sinful extremes

Clay Thoughts:

The baroque may have never existed. Does it exist now? Has it ever existed and if it does where does it live?

A further thought, based on what we were just discussing: the classical period was rigorous in its architecture, but certainly not without inventiveness.

Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli (easy day trip from Rome) for instance has many features that share qualities with Baroque & Mannerist works.

Is there any connective tissue there? Had that been rediscovered and excavated and documented in time for Borromini and Bernini to know it? If so, can direct parallels be drawn? If not, what other works may have possibly inspired them?