The Dark Architect

Today, being a radical artist (in my opinion) is quite difficult due to the cultural appreciation for lack of censorship.  This allows any able bodied performer, medium artist, or word smith to envision and create pieces of increasing vulgar without a shock and awe reaction from public critiques.  It was this reaction that generated increasing interests in unexpected witnesses which then widespread to the public “acceptance” domain; for example, rock and roll was once portrayed as the “devil’s music.”  This is primarily due to the fact that these initial rock poets focused on lyrics that pertained to drug use and pleasing sexual drives, but this radical shift led to some of the most brilliantly composed pieces of rock history (I.E. Led Zeppelin, Rush, The Who, Iron Maiden, The Police, etc…).

If anyone knows my personality, they would know that I love skill based classic rock and 90’s punk rock primarily for these anti-establishment bases (not that I believe what any of them sing about).  Piranesi is one of the best examples to portray as one of these artists in the realm of architecture.  His bleak, dark, dismal architectural spaces had not only ever been seen before in the world of artistic paper architecture, but led the human mind to question as to “why, how, where?” 

Piranesi’s view on philosophical theory truly allowed him to mentally grasp a whole new spectrum of how to manipulate light and material into an atmosphere that manifested emotions within people of discomfort and even fear (debatably).  This really motivated his piers to further examine the beauty in his madness. 

Peers such as Yo-Yo Ma continue to seek further understanding of the emotional reason within these two-dimensional fantasies.  Although this cellist is by no means correlated to the network of architecture, his beautiful understanding of emotion through music al composition allows him to be a perfect “scientist” in the anatomical breakdown of how this flattened atmosphere may project emotion through the medium of sound.  In his experiment, a team of architects created what they imagined Piranesi’s Prison to look as if constructed three-dimensionally.  Once the space had been forged, Yo-Yo Ma would then be virtually seated within the penitentiary, from which he would portray the emotion he felt through a cello.  Below, you may see this experiment to its full fruition…

Piranesi’s works in the realm of two-dimensional emotional darkness influenced many other architects to pursue this limitless design opportunity of paper architecture (Louis Boullee, Melnikov, Archigram, etc…) in hopes to achieve emotional feats of their own.  Boullee tackled the idea of emotional impact when viewing the perfection of spheres both worldly and extraterrestrial (planetarium). 

As a conclusion and, in a way, a falsification of my opening statement, it seems to me that this emotional use of “paper architecture” is coming back.  I still believe it is almost impractical to be a radical artist today due to the fact that the emotional reaction required by human minds to truly make a piece philosophical and not “weird,” but the emotional impacts derived from the use of two-dimensional atmospheres in architecture remains to be one of the primary tools in selling a design concept.  The works submitted into the annual Evolo competition show how this is true.  Through the use of tantalizing photoshopped imagery, competitors hope to gain an edge over other teams by visually swaying the jury into believing that their design “could” stimulate emotion in such manors as portrayed on their presentation boards.