Sintomi di modernità

The work of 18th century architect and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi continues to re-emerge in contemporary architectural discourse (Eisenman). Over two and a half centuries after their production, his images continue to raise issues that architecture is still addressing in a process of historical reframing (Tafuri) and ongoing self definition (Allen) not only within a critical discourse that remains internal to architecture through theoretical reconsiderations (Bloomer) but also in continuously questioning and redefining its role in relation to society, politics, and the complex forces that make the city (Aureli, Wallis de Vries).

A contemporary re-examination of Piranesi’s critique of the classical language of architecture and of urban space may suggest a reading that, beyond the crisis of languages, resonates with the current shift in architecture from the definition of a form to the ongoing workings of its materiality. By re-reading Piranesi’s work we can identify in the crisis of the classical the possibilities already at work of an architecture of becoming: an architecture beyond form, which works with change and materiality.

Teresa Stoppani è professore di architettura alla Leeds Beckett University in Gran Bretagna, dove dirige il programma di dottorato in architettura alla School of Art, Architecture and Design. È autore di Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice (Routledge, 2010) e di Unorthodox Ways [to Rethink Architecture and the City] (Routledge, 2018); con Giorgio Ponzo e George Themistokleous ha curato This Thing Called Theory (Routledge, 2016).