Architect: Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longue Durée

Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longue Durée

Beatrice Lampariello

This text is excerpted from Aldo Rossi. Insulae, edited by Nadejda Bartels, a catalogue that accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin, run by the Tchoban Foundation (on display from 4 February – 14 May 2023). Drawing represented for Aldo Rossi the privileged… Read More

In the Archive: Petit, Lebas, Fontaine, Le Corbusier and Kolář

In the Archive: Petit, Lebas, Fontaine, Le Corbusier and Kolář

Raphael Haque

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. In this series, Drawing Matter invites visitors to write about material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that they have viewed as part of their research. In The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel likens a library to a human brain and… Read More

Piranesi Unbound (2020): Review

Piranesi Unbound (2020): Review

Nicholas Savage

There is much to admire in this sequel to Heather Hyde Minor’s Piranesi’s Lost Words (Penn State, 2015), which sets out to ‘explore new territory by reimagining his artistic production in terms of his books’. Whereas Lost Words drew attention to Piranesi as an author who combined texts and images… Read More

Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal

Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal

Olivier Bellflamme

It’s 1777 in the Italian region of Salerno, a man is resting on a massive Doric column, watching his two cows from the ruin of a temple where the weeds grow. This building was, a long time ago, considered as the house of Juno, goddess of fertility and the vital… Read More

The Perpetual Race of Piranesi and the Tortoise

The Perpetual Race of Piranesi and the Tortoise

Marc McGowan

Melting reality, ancient history and fantasy into one, the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi hold an unparalleled allure that continues to entrance and captivate. They offer an escape into imagined and unknown worlds; each drawing an organism of its own, containing an immense depth of spatial layering and an extraordinary… Read More

Writing Prize 2020: Domestic Space, Registered

Writing Prize 2020: Domestic Space, Registered

Laura Bonell and Daniel López-Dòriga

Around 200 AD, a map of the city of Rome was carved on marble at a scale of approximately 1:240. It measured 18 meters wide by 13 meters high and comprised 150 marble slabs hung on an interior wall of the Templum Pacis. The Forma Urbis Romae or Severan Marble Plan, as… Read More