{architecture} – Page 113

Carceri, thermae and candelabra

Piranesi’s etching which purports to show a statue gallery at Hadrian’s Villa was published in 1770 as part of the artist’s Vedute di Roma series, and conveniently provides a themed link for a pair of new exhibitions. The artist’s attribution of statue gallery was a mistaken one, the structure is actually the remains of Hadrian’s thermae, or baths, but archaeology was still in its infancy in the 18th century so mistakes were inevitable. If you’re fortunate enough to be in Venice during the next two months the Fondazione Cini has a major exhibition of Piranesi’s work, The Art of Piranesi: architect, engraver, antiquarian, vedutista, designer. On display are over three hundred prints which no doubt include many of the Vedute di Roma.

Ornamental candelabrum created by Factum Arte from a design by Piranesi.

Good as that sounds, what’s especially notable about this exhibition is a presentation of three-dimensional works specially created from Piranesi’s designs for candelabra, fireplaces, and other objects based on his studies of artefacts from the ancient world. These pieces have been produced by Factum Arte who have a great website showing the finished pieces and also a page detailing the production of the objects. Also on that page is one of the exhibition’s other features, a 10-minute video by Gregoire Dupond which cleverly joins together and animates a journey through several of Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons). The music accompaniment is Bach’s Cello Suite 2 which happens to be the piece played by Yo-Yo Ma in an earlier animation of the Carceri, so it’s a reasonable guess that the earlier film was an inspiration for this new work. The exhibition runs to November 21, 2010.

Jack’s Bath (2010) by Danny Jauregui. Gouache on canvas.

Hadrian’s obsession with his doomed lover Antinous makes the Emperor a gay icon which explains the connection between Piranesi’s view of the ruined baths and an exhibition of work by American artist Danny Jauregui. There Goes the Neighborhood is at the Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, New York, and features a selection of Jauregui’s paintings of tiles from the bathhouses which were a feature of gay life in the days before AIDS.

I make paintings of bathhouses in ruin. Moldy, disheveled and abandoned, the paintings are memorials to the absence of memorials – indexes of the traumatic erasure inflicted on the radical gay sexuality of the past. They are paintings of what I imagine those spaces to look like, had they not been disguised and hidden from sight. (More.)

The exhibition runs until October 30, 2010. By coincidence gay news blog Towleroad had a post yesterday about New York’s first anti-gay police raid on the Ariston Baths in 1903.

Time Bandits.

Seeing as I posted the picture of Hadrian’s baths I have to also post this shot from Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) showing the interior of the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness. Here we see the Piranesi’s ruined baths incorporated into a vast and gloomy space which must surely be inspired by the Carceri, the views of Rome being absorbed by the artist’s darker imaginings. And for a final piece of trivia, writer Marguerite Yourcenar is not only the author of Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), a novel about the Emperor’s passion for Antinous, but also penned an essay about the Carceri. I haven’t read either of those works so I think it’s time to add them to the shopping list.

Update: For those in the UK, there’s also Piranesi’s Prisons, an exhibition at the Mead Gallery, Warwick, from now until December.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La Tour by Schuiten & Peeters
• Set in Stone
• Hadrian and Greek love
• Piranesi as designer
• Vedute di Roma
• Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons
• The Cult of Antinous

Infernal entrances

L’Enfer, Boulevard de Clichy (1911).

A recent posting at The Haunted Lamp showed the interior of L’Enfer, a Montmartre cabaret which described itself as “unique au monde”, pictured here in a memorable photo by Eugène Atget. The interior and portions of the exterior were certainly unique enough, and look like they were created by the same people who designed the carnival show for Harry Lachman’s film Dante’s Inferno (1935), but the yawning mouth as an entrance isn’t without precedent. Some prior examples follow.

Palazzo Zuccari.

L’Enfer is long gone, unfortunately, but the entrance to the Palazzo Zuccari in the Via Gregoriana, Rome, is still extant despite being hundreds of years older. I was hoping that Google’s Street View would have some good pictures but they managed to capture the building in the midst of renovation. A friend of mine was working at an office in this street when I was in Rome in 1993 and the yawning mouths and windows are a very curious sight in a narrow road near the Spanish Steps. Flickr has better views, here, here and here.

Ogre, Parco dei Mostri.

The Rome palazzo is named after the Mannerist artist who lived there, Federico Zuccari (c. 1542/1543–1609), and Zuccari’s inspiration for his doorway came from another Mannerist creation, the Parco dei Mostri at Bomarzo. The mouth in this case isn’t an entrance to the underworld but a devouring ogre, and one of the park’s many grotesque attractions. I wonder if this was also an inspiration for the giant floating head in John Boorman’s ludicrous science fiction film, Zardoz (1974).

Moulin Rouge!

And speaking of films, Baz Luhrmann used the L’Enfer entrance as a gateway to Montmartre itself in the zooming shot which opens Moulin Rouge!. I like that idea, as though it’s an iniquitous equivalent of the old Temple Bar gateway to the City of London. For more pictures of L’Enfer, and details of its history, see here and here. If anyone knows of any other notable doorways like these, please leave a comment.

Update: Nathalie found another Bomarzo influence while Jescie on Twitter drew my attention to a set from this German film.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Villa d’Este
• Harry Lachman’s Inferno
• Atget’s Paris

Weekend links 32

Red Quechquemitls (2010) by Sylvia Ji.

• The Blackout Mix, a pay-what-thou-wilt 49-minute mixtape, “specially designed to accompany (or simulate) a human-plant interaction”. Art by Arik Roper, music selection by Jay Babcock.

• An ode to the many evolved virtues of human semen: “the penis is capable of dispensing a sort of natural Prozac” says Jesse Bering.

• The new John Foxx CD & DVD release, D.N.A., has a Jonathan Barnbrook cover, a new collaboration with Harold Budd and a disc of short films.

• “I have been copying Margaret Hamilton my whole life, and I am proud to admit it. The Wicked Witch of the West, the jolie laide heroine of every bad little boy’s and girl’s dream of notoriety and style, whose twelve minutes of screen time in The Wizard of Oz can never be topped … I’m a big butch-lesbian hag. I love the ones with chips on their shoulders and heavy attitude. They’re my real favorites.” John Waters always gives great interviews.

• Listen to a track from the forthcoming Brian Eno album while you’re reading Kristine McKenna’s interview with the man himself at Arthur mag. Includes an appreciation by Alan Moore.

Atropa Bella Donna (2009) by Sylvia Ji.

• Steven Severin is touring the UK this month, performing a live accompaniment to screenings of Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet. He’s at the Tyneside Cinema this Tuesday. Other dates can be found on his website.

• “I know it’s a very emotive subject and you’re either for it or against it but for a jobbing self-employed musician such as me – bootlegging (CD copying) is just killing us.” Finding The Spaces Between: musician Chris Carter (Throbbing Gristle, Chris & Cosey, et al) interviewed.

• Mile End Pugatorio (1991), a one-minute film-poem by Guy Sherwin and Martin Doyle. Related: four one-minute movies by The Residents.

• Gijs Van Vaerenbergh installed an Upside Dome at the St. Michiel Church in Leuven, Belgium.

• Sidney Sime illustrates Lord Dunsany at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• Europe according to gay men. There’s more at Mapping Stereotypes.

• There’s never a dull moment in the High Desert.

• Generative art by Leonardo Solas.

Alhambra cyanotypes

The cyanotype process is a very old photographic printing technique and also the source of the word “blueprint”, after the process became common among builders and engineers for the printing of plans. The technique also has its enthusiasts today, some examples of which can be seen here. These views of the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, were taken by Carl Curman, a Swedish scientist and photographer, in 1878. The Swedish National Heritage Board at Flickr has two sets of Curman’s travel photography which include additional views of the Alhambra as well as other cyanotypes.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Constantinople, 1900
• Edinburgh, 1929
• Old Bunker Hill
• Inondations 1910
• Berenice Abbott
• Eugene de Salignac
• Luther Gerlach’s Los Angeles
• The temples of Angkor
• The Bradbury Building: Looking Backward from the Future
• Edward Steichen
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Atget’s Paris
• Downtown LA by Ansel Adams

Esquisses Décoratives by René Binet

The work of French architect and designer René Binet (1866–1911) has been featured here before with one of his most famous creations, the monumental gate he designed for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. Philippe Jullian in his 1974 book about the exposition, The Triumph of Art Nouveau, calls the gate the “Porte Binet” and also notes that it was referred to as “the Salamander” for its resemblance to the salamander stoves of the period.

The reference to nature is apt, albeit for a different reason, since it was Ernst Haeckel’s Kunst-Formen der Natur which Binet used as inspiration for his designs, the encrustation on the gate being based on Haeckel’s studies of shell forms. This influence was developed four years later in Binet’s Esquisses Décoratives, a series of speculative designs which applied Haeckel’s work to architecture and interior design as a whole; the Porte Binet can be seen on the title plate above and the print there seems to have been either signed by or dedicated to Haeckel.

Art Nouveau design is usually thought of in terms of the curvaceous style derived from Alphonse Mucha and others, but there were several designers of the period looking to nature for inspiration in a way which went beyond William Morris’s application of plant forms to flat surfaces. Binet’s lamp designs below show how Haeckel’s sea-life could be transmuted into enclosures for electric lights. These designs hint at a direction which went unexplored in the 20th century; the Art Nouveau style was steadily vulgarised after the Exposition Universelle until it was replaced altogether by the development of Art Deco following the First World War. Binet went on to design the extension of the Paris department store, Printemps, but his huge Art Nouveau atrium was later destroyed by fire.

There aren’t many examples of Binet’s designs on web pages, the ones here are from this Flickr set and a vintage print seller. There is a recent study of Binet’s work available, however, René Binet: from Nature to Form by Olaf Breidbach. For an idea of how an entire city based on Haeckel might look, we have Schuiten and Peeters’ imaginary metropolis of Blossfeldtstad whose “Vegetalistic” architecture was featured in an earlier post.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Palais de l’Optique, 1900
• Exposition Universelle films
• Exposition jewellery
• Exposition Universelle catalogue
• Exposition Universelle publications
• Exposition cornucopia
• Return to the Exposition Universelle
• The Palais Lumineux
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• Exposition Universelle, 1900