Visionary architecture
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Visionary architecture or "paper architecture" is the name given to architecture which exists only on paper or which has visionary qualities. Étienne-Louis Boullée, Claude Nicolas Ledoux and Jean-Jacques Lequeu are one of the earliest examples of the discipline. But the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Antonio Sant'Elia and Buckminster Fuller is also included. In the latter half of the 20th century, there were architectural design movements such as Archigram, Archizoom and Superstudio.
The architectural paintings of Giorgio de Chirico also are sometimes included in this category.
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Early designers and artists
During the Renaissance period, the differing representations of buildings evolved and grew rapidly through the introduction of perspective. The discovery of this visualization tool, allowed for experimentation with imaginary architectural scenes, and while many architects wrote greatly on the subject, others articulated their concepts and ideas through drawings.
During the sixteenth century, a Dutch painter and architect, Jan Vredeman de Vries, produced numerous engravings, which portrayed new forms of architectural representation. His works were of pure fantasy and imagination, but were also regarded as avant-garde messages in the depiction of architectural space.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi was considered one of the greatest printmakers of the eighteenth century. He is notably one of the greatest printmakers of his time, where it is through this medium in which he demonstrated his mastering of etchings of imagined spaces. It was suggested that the drawn spaces would lose their magic and meaning if they were to be physically built in real life, as they would lose their unique forms of detail and intricacy, which is only achieved through drawings. The particular series of etchings ‘Prisons (Carceri d'invenzione) or 'Imaginary Prisons,’ depict his famous fictitious and atmospheric etchings of Rome’s ancient remains, and his dreams of antiquity that often surpassed reality.
Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Monument to Newton is considered to be more perfect due to its capability in successfully defying any attempt to physically use it, being the most magnificent unusable space images, a dome with its literal-minded fulfilment underfoot, in a second answering dome.
The young motion picture industry also created an impact within the architectural scene, represented through the films ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Just Imagine.’ This differing form of media allowed for the elaborate and imaginative architectural sets depicting futuristic scenes to be observed. Through this, other significant artists and architects such as Hugh Feriss were influenced.
Late 20th Century Designers and Architects
Peter Zumthor is another significant figure that adhered to the work of the unbuilt and paper architecture. The writing in his architectural manifesto of ‘Thinking Architecture,’ Zumthor grasps the significance of emotion and experience as measuring tools of the architecture, thus being the before-hand process of the design. His work was greatly unpublished because his philosophical belief of how architecture should be experienced first hand played a greater role in his designs. His perception that designing buildings should relate directly to our emotions.
Rem Koolhaas moved to New York in 1972, where his years of being situated in Manhattan, expanded his fascination with the city, leading to a close examination of the dynamics, which constructed it. His writing ‘Delirious New York’ and the theory of manhattanism are the results of this study depicts his perception on the manifesto of the city, dealing with the city as a subject, where the book itself is a spatial project, while the text explains the structure of the city, using the narrative sequence and typographic layout to effectively mimic the space.
Hermann Finsterlin is considered to be the one of the most radical of the Expressionists, and is notable known for having produced fascinating carbuncular studies of the most unbuildable and obscure buildings. Although he never built anything, his visionary drawings focused on perspectives, playing with the forms of unusual, organic shapes. Finsterlin’s architectural drawings would require the most devious methods to physically build as they go against their form, beginning with careful dissection and separate moulding of each part, only emphasizing and confirming that they are among the purest paper buildings ever developed.
Lebbeus Woods, after working with Eero Saarinen in the 1960s, turned to visionary architecture around 1976, producing a body of drawings and models that reimagine cities like Berlin, Paris, Havana, and Vienna. He also worked extensively in Sarajevo in the 1990s. He is now a professor at Cooper Union and other institutions and maintains a personal blog for his ideas and reflections.
See also
- Index of architecture articles
- Congressional Cemetery
- Johannes Baader
- Hermann Finsterlin
- Galleri Rom
- Futurist architecture
- Constructability
- Giovanni Battista Piranesi
- Johannes Baader
- Jean-Jacques Lequeu
- Étienne-Louis Boullée
- Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin
- Hermann Finsterlin
- Antonio Sant'Elia
- Avant-garde architecture
- Fantastic architecture
Bibliography
- Visionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu by Jean-Claude Lemagny, pub. Hennessey & Ingalls; ISBN 0-940512-35-1; (July 2002)
