previous | next

Piranesi distanced himself at times completely from topography, opting rather for outlandish inflations of his subject, for improbable architectural projects, city-like accumulations of masonry, audacious architectural conjectures (His massive inhabited bridge for Rome of 1780 is interesting to compare with Ferriss' Inhabited Bridge for New York in 1929.)

Most exciting are his city fantasies; extraordinary extrapolations from the ruins that surrounded him together with febrile architectural imaginings, astonishing in their complexity; great masses of building piles of terraces, fabulous stacked-up fantasies of façade and column. Essentially urban are the 'Carceri' or prison fantasies (admired by de Quincey) in which the fact of incarceration is made nightmaringly taunting: for there ever appears to be a level, an arch…and yet another level, yet another. But we are looking here at more than a penitentiary (however stylised); rather at an evocation of City.

The spirit of Piranesi persists right though the nineteenth century. Gautier writes in Madamemoiselle de Maupin of:

"Une architecture feeique...des entassements de colonnes, des arcades superposees, une vapeur splendide, pleine de bruit et de vertige—un luxe tout assyrien."

These models all prefigure the architectural fantasists of a century later, Hood, Ferriss, to the makers of Metropolis, of Bladerunner. (Clearly there is direct and declared influence; but I like to imagine that we are looking here at an imaginative and recurrent eruption of a Jungian archetype, not a mere transmission of urban iconography.)

Predictions for the city of the future: another whole history here!

First there is the earnest planning of rational future cities, the kind of thing done by Filarete in the fifteenth century (Sforzinda); in the sixteenth century by Bacon (New Atlantis); by Campanella, in the seventeenth century (La Citta del Sole); Ledoux in the eighteenth century (Chaux).

previous | next