Academy Architects at the Acquario
Casa dell'Architettura, Rome, 3-19 june 2009
Academy Architects at the Acquario is a group exhibition with architects from the Accademia di Romania in Roma, Istituto Svizzero di Roma, American Academy in Rome, Accademia di Danimarca, The British School at Rome, and the Real Academia de Espana en Roma. Curator: Shara Wasserman.
Related links:
Casa dell'Architettura website
fake spaces: mapping the illusion
This research focuses on the documentation of examples of optical and spatial illusions found in Renaissance and Baroque Italian architecture. This research on the “art of visual deception” (lo inganno degl’occhi) acts as a foundation for architectural experiments dealing with the perception of “fake” spaces. The generated work is an attempt to distort the visitor’s experience of space while experimenting with perceptual complexity and ambiguity.
Surface / depth
Many examples of painted spaces were looked at in order to understand the possibilities of representing depth on a flat surface, or to visually expand space. Also, examples of false perspective, foreshortening, and other spatial techniques to modify the visitor’s perception of space were documented in Rome, Milan, Florence, Vicenza and Venice. fake spaces is thus a reinterpretation of perceived spaces by Bramante, Bernini, Borromini and Palladio, as well as Pozzo’s painted spaces, and Peruzzi’s Villa Farnesina, among others.
Scale 1:1
In principle, all architectural “project” (i.e. a “projection” of a built, future project) is a representation, an illusion of the “real”. fake spaces seeks to exploit the possibilities of 1:1 scale and of “illusion” to create a future architecture. At the same time, it creates an ambiguity between what is “real” (or the “built” project) and what is a “representation” (the “not yet built” project). After all, it asks the question: Are the villa Farnesina or San Ignazio di Loyola’s dome “real”? Is this panel that you are presently looking at “real”? Does contemporary disposable architecture tend to be real or just temporary and fake?
Materiality
Working at scale 1 :1 in an attempt to create the illusion also means to “fake” materiality. If Pozzo and Peruzzi used paint, perspective and quadratura techniques, photography and Photoshop can be used today. A photographic mapping of different materials found in Rome, ancient and contemporary, thus becomes the “material library” used to construct the illusion.
2D / 3D
In order to convey space and depth, 3D physical models at different scales were used as “stage sets” and then re-assembled at 1 :1 scale to form a complete image. Working with models such as a real plywood window frame, or wall opening, is also an attempt to bring the conception of architecture closer to the actual world, with actual, “real” fabrication and bodily perception, rather than conceiving an architecture of a reduced scale.
Acknowledgments: Marianne Bär-Gendron
View of exhibition
View of installation
Concept drawing for banner / panel