{architecture} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 798

Atlantis (1971) by Bartolomeu Cid dos Santos.

• “Given the workaday settings of many of his movies (a hotel, a summer camp, a science fair), their mortal stakes may come as a surprise, or at least as a paradox—yet paradox is at the heart of his entire body of work.” Richard Brody explores the New Yorker roots of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch.

• “The power of the Kelmscott Chaucer is in how all the elements harmonise to create something visually spectacular.” Michael John Goodman on William Morris and his reinvention of book design.

• At Smithsonian Mag: “What actually sparks Will-o’-the-Wisps? A new study traces the science behind the mysterious, wandering lights“.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: A chronology of 26 things with Clive Barker’s name on them and what he thinks about that.

• At Wormwoodiana: The novels of Derek Raymond and the type of crime fiction he called “The Black Novel”.

• At Colossal: Untamed flora subsumes abandoned greenhouses in Romain Veillon’s Secret Gardens.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from James Tenney: Writings and Interviews on Experimental Music.

• The Strange World of…Mulatu Astatke.

• RIP Patricia Routledge.

• The Garden (1981) by John Foxx | The Secret Garden: Main Title (1993) by Zbigniew Preisner | Secret Garden (2011) by Sussan Deyhim

Weekend links 797

Bloomsbury Roofs (no date) by J. Elspeth Robertson.

• “Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge…are only offshoots of a huge central corpus of mad experimental writing, prose and poetry and just research notes. Pages and pages and pages of this lunacy.” Iain Sinclair describing to Robert Davidson the genesis of his influential poem/book Lud Heat. Related: Serious houses: The Lud Heat Tapes.

• At Criterion Current: Deeper into Robert Altman, a look at five lesser-known films from the director’s expansive filmography. Good to see Quintet receiving some attention, a science-fiction film that’s not without flaws but is still closer to the written SF of the 1970s than the decade’s box-office hits.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Short Fiction, by Charles Beaumont.

• Mix of the week: Ambient Focus 26.06.21 by Kevin Richard Martin aka The Bug.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty chooses 10 great films set in 1970s America.

• At Colossal: Frédéric Demeuse’s photos of ancient forests.

• RIP Claudia Cardinale and Danny Thompson.

• New music: If the Sun Dies by Greg Weeks.

• The Strange World of…Rafael Toral.

• Silver Forest (1969) by Organisation | A Forest (1980) by The Cure | A Forest In The Sky (2024) by Hawksmoor

Weekend links 793

Shinagawa, Tokyo Tower (Tokaido Station 1) (1967) by Sekino Jun’ichiro.

• “The historical figures who interested [Cormac] McCarthy the most, judging by the number of books he owned about them, were Albert Einstein (114 books), Winston Churchill (88) and James Joyce (78). Architecture is the dominant subject in the collection, with 855 books. The human being whom McCarthy most admired, Dennis confirms, was Ludwig Wittgenstein. The team catalogued a staggering 142 books by or about the philosopher, with a high proportion annotated.” Richard Grant for Smithsonian Magazine reports on the cataloguing of Cormac McCarthy’s personal library.

• The Real City of the Future: a long read by Charles T. Rubin taking in William Gibson’s urban fictions and Paolo Soleri’s towering Arcologies.

• At Colossal: “Atmospheric oil paintings by Martin Wittfooth illuminate nature’s timeless cycles.”

• Old music: White Souls In Black Suits by Clock DVA, receiving its first reissue since 1990.

• At the BFI: Carmen Gray on where to begin with Sergei Parajanov.

• At Ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon: The art of Sekino Jun’ichiro.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Unica Zürn Day (restored and expanded).

• New music: Imploded Versions by The Bug vs. Ghost Dubs.

• The Strange World of…Van Morrison.

• Dev Hynes’ favourite albums.

• Carnival Of Souls (1989) by David Van Tieghem | All Souls (1989) by Opal | The Cult Of Souls (2011) by The Wounded Kings

Weekend links 791

Cover design by Marian Bantjes for a 2009 series of Nabokov reprints.

• “It is quite unlike the bland featurelessnesses of the current fiction in which dull creative writing students chat to dull creative writing students (there is today a generalised fear of imaginative invention and giving offence).” Jonathan Meades on late style and Vladimir Nabokov’s Transparent Things.

• Cathi Unsworth remembers the late Roger K. Burton, founder of London’s unique exhibition and venue space, The Horse Hospital.

• New music: Interior of an Edifice Under the Sea by Pan American & Kramer; Glass Colored Lilly by Yuki Fujiwara.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – August 2025 at Ambientblog, and Bleep Mix 307 by On-U Sound.

• At the BFI: Michael Brooke chooses 10 great Eastern European science-fiction films.

• At The Wire: David Toop and Ania Psenitsnikova on moving beyond music and dance.

• At Colossal: Weird Buildings celebrates architects who think outside the box.

• Verbal #12 includes new fiction by Michael Moorcock, among others.

• At Unquiet Things: Exquisite incantations in clay by Forest Rogers.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Experimo.

• Dale Cornish’s favourite albums.

• Tenth Letter of the Alphabet

• Ecstasy Symphony/Transparent Radiation (Flashback) (1987) by Spacemen 3 | Almost Transparent Blue (1996) by David Toop | Transparent (1997) by Reflection

Vincenzo Mazzi’s caprices

More Italian theatrical design. A few years ago I put together a collection of production sketches and paintings for scenes set inside vast prisons, a popular setting in opera and theatre during the Baroque and Romantic periods. Piranesi’s etching series, Carceri d’Invenzione, is the ultimate expression of the form, where the prints exist to show architectural invention and nothing more, but Piranesi wasn’t the first or last artist to concern himself with views like these.

Caprici di Scene Teatrali (1776) is a collection of fifteen printed plates by Vincenzo Mazzi showing suggestions for theatrical settings, several of which are prison settings. All of the scenes are distinctly Piranesian, especially the title plate which has the name of the artist and his series carved on stones inside the artwork. The prints seem to be the bulk of Mazzi’s surviving designs although a few additional examples turn up when you search around. There’s also at least one Mazzi portrait of an actor which suggests that most of the artist’s output confined itself to the theatre.

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