quondam @ archinect/79/7921h.htm
Novels about architecture
Rita Novel 2005.07.21 18:03
Maybe Piranesi's Dream: A Novel?
I'm re-reading it presently, and it is fun.
My comments here show I was first reading it exactly four years ago:
I'm almost finished reading Gerhard Kopf's PIRANESI'S DREAM, a 1992 autobiographical novel written in German, and translated into English in 2000. So far it is a very good read, and very architectural in its content, with lots of surprises like Piranesi's wife having been a high class prostitute/whore and full disclosure of Winckelmann's homosexuality (i.e., 'art history' beginning because some man loved young testicles, etc.). The whole book is written in the first person, with that person being the present dead Piranesi. Besides enjoying all of Piraneis's thoughts, I also find the book a quite interesting comment on architecture and its aesthetics today in that the course of human events is often so easily misguided. Piranesi is not a happy dead man, and he tells you why.
Here's an excerpt I find most inducing:
"But even worse was to come. I was assused of reveling in the ugly. What humbug! The theory of the fine arts, the legislation of good taste, the science of aesthetics were already highly developed and thoroughly refined in my time. Only the concept of the ugly, although they touched upon it everywhere, had remained behind. And actually what is ugly exists insofar as what is beautiful does. What is ugly comes into being from and with the beautiful. It is indignant at what is beautiful and likes to form an alliance with what is comical. In Nature what is ugly exists as little as what is beautiful or straight lines do, and it is a mistake to consider disease a cause of what is ugly. The realm of the ugly is much larger than the realm of sensual phenomena in general. Beautiful and ugly are not value opposites, rather at best opposites of stimulation. Concerning anything that is ugly it must be said that the relationship to what is beautiful that is neglected by it is included. Only what is ugly guarentees the aesthetic correction of tradition."
Just think about how true (and perhaps even axiomatic) that last sentence really is.
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