Abstract
The work entitled Hypnerotomachia Poliphili , printed by Aldo Manuzio in 1499 in Venice and provisionally attributed to Francesco Colonna, is a book in which architecture, whether described or illustrated, is the true protagonist, representing the character to which the greatest number of words are dedicated. The manner of going about this is not that of the academic treaties which began to appear at that time, exacting the privileged position of the discipline among artifice and the arts and classifying and suggesting models to imitate, inspired on antiquity; rather, it held it to form part of that privileged bit of reality in which occurrences take place: the physical and symbolic stage for the most relevant events. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili , the text and its 171 xylographies, is a complete architectural analysis insofar as it represents an expostulated critique of preceding constructions and ideologies, as well as a study and evaluation of the conditions of the area, the user and the landscape. It likewise represents the execution of a project methodology. Following an examination of the surrounding area comes an architectural suggestion which prods the flexible limits of reality: the suggestiveness of some of the most bizarre and raucous buildings ever imagined, which succumb to the strict laws of geometry and proportions while paying no heed to the laws of gravity. Its modern qualities, interest and benefits for contemporary architecture are also to be found in other matters: in its use of composition techniques based on collage, superimposition and accumulation; in the novelty of the poetic concession of ruin and in the archaeological perception of inheritance and legacy; in the rejection of the city as a concerted, like-minded dwelling site; in the pursuit of dispersion, fissures and fragments; in its insistence on the idea of architecture as a hollow, an interior, a welcoming void, the domestication and humanization of a bit of space.
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