quondam @ archinect/79/7912m.htm
Gay Architecture
Rita Novel 2005.04.04 18:16
A trivial day
1999.11.19 14:29
At around 9.59 am this morning, I was sitting next to my brother in the waiting room of a doctor's office, waiting for one of Otto's regular doctor visits. Since the days in 1994 when I used to take our Dad to therapy after he lost his first leg, I always take a clipboard and pad of paper with me whenever I have to go a doctor's office (which is a lot!). Anyway, I always write notes, and I always date them. So today I started by writing 11.19.99, and I said to Otto, "look, today's one one one nine nine nine." It didn't seem to impress him.
I've been writing all day, actually. I have to finish up a paper I'll be presenting in Brussels, Belgium next week (Thanksgiving Day, which, in case you don't know, comes after Ax Wednesday). The paper is on Piranesi's Campo Marzio, and today I've been writing the section entitled "love and war." Here's my favorite paragraph:
Atop the bluffs along the south bank of the Petronia Amnis, Piranesi situates a series garden villas among a scattering of other building types. The planning of the villas individually is orderly, if not also symmetrical, yet, in relation to one another, the grouping of the villas appears completely disorganized. Once the names of the various buildings is understood, however, a distinctive pattern develops. The first and largest villa is the Horti Lucullani, the Gardens of L. Licinius Lucullus, which, in 46 AD "belonged to Valerius Asiaticus, but were coveted by Messalina, who compelled the owner to commit suicide." Messalena was the nymphomaniac wife of the emperor Claudius. Next to the Horti Lucullani is the plain and simple Horti Narcissi; Narcissus was the name of the freedman of Claudius by whose orders Messalena was put to death. Next to the Horti Narcissi is the triangular Horti Anteri. There was no real garden of Anteri in ancient Rome, but there was such a thing as an anteros, which is an avenger of slighted love, or, in this case, love triangles. Then there is a bath complex in honor of Venus, the love goddess herself, and then a nympheum named for Tiberius, an emperor known for his fondness of pornography. And, at the edge of the Ichnographia, there is the Viridarium Lucii Cornificii, a pleasure garden with two building extensions clearly phallic in plan. Finally, among these structures of love and lust are two Turres expugnandae, military defense towers whose plans no doubt represent substantial erections.
lauf-s
ps
I watched Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters for the first time last night. I had no idea one of the minor characters was going to be an architect with a schizophrenic wife.
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