Abstract
Albrecht Dürer's woodcuts Apocalypsis cum figuris (c.1498) present images in which space is almost entirely defined and structured by human bodies. In the engraved Capricci by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (c.1744–47) and by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (c.1740–2) the proliferation in space of architectural debris and the figures that coexist with it collaborate in the definition of space as a seamless clump of matter. Architecture has altogether disappeared from Francisco Goya's The Disasters of War (1810–20), where an incommensurable space is at once shallow and endlessly deep: matter solidified by horror. In Jake and Dinos Chapman's re-workings of Goya's Disasters of War (1999–2005) figures re-emerge from this solid space and are returned to the foreground, ready to spring out of the image. Through these and other examples, this essay explores forms of representation that challenge the integrity of the body, both architectural and human, in an explosive crescendo in which the technical materiality of the drawn line gradually dissolves to return to three-dimensional space. It argues that violence here is not only pertinent to the contents of the images—apocalypse, destruction, war, disaster, martyrdom—but is intrinsic to the technical medium of the representation.
Highlights
Before Bernard Tschumi’s 1970s drawings of architecture used suicide, murder, mutiny, and violent acts in general to explore the limits of the conventions of architectural representation, other representations of events had altogether dispensed with architecture, or had shown it in tatters, as a broken object no longer able to define space
Architecture has altogether disappeared from Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War (1810-20), where an incommensurable space is at onece shallow and endlessly deep – matter solidified by horror
In Jake and Dinos Chapman’s reworkings of Goya’s Disasters of War (1999-2005) figures re-emerge from this solid space and are returned to the foreground, ready to spring out of the image. Through these and other examples, this essay explores forms of representation that challenge the integrity of the body, both architectural and human, in an explosive crescendo in which the technical materiality of the drawn line gradually dissolves to return to three-dimensional space
Summary
Before Bernard Tschumi’s 1970s drawings of architecture used suicide, murder, mutiny, and violent acts in general to explore the limits (and the limitations) of the conventions of architectural representation, other representations of events had altogether dispensed with architecture, or had shown it in tatters, as a broken object no longer able to define space These images had shown that solid walls are not needed to define space, and architecture can be designed by spatial relations and positions identified by bodies, objects and fragments. In Jake and Dinos Chapman’s reworkings of Goya’s Disasters of War (1999-2005), figures re-emerge from this solid space and are returned to the foreground, ready to spring out of the image These and the other examples considered here experiment with forms of representation that challenge the integrity of the body, both architectural and human, in an explosive crescendo where the technical materiality of the drawn line gradually dissolves to return to three-dimensional space, and to movement. They imply the dissolution of the tekton of a solid architecture, indirectly suggesting the possibility of a different tekton, one which the discipline of architecture is still coming to terms with, but is already both made possible and realized by new technologies of digital fabrication and organic growth
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