On view in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini through November 25, 2012
This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale includes a major project developed by architect and Yale School of Architecture Professor Peter Eisenman. Titled The Piranesi Variations, this multipart endeavor focuses on Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s 1762 Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma, a folio of six etchings that depict his fantastical vision of what ancient Rome might have looked like, derived from years of archaeological and architectural research. Piranesi’s images—precise, specific, yet impossible—have been a source of speculation, inspiration, research, and contention for architects, urban designers, and scholars since their publication 250 years ago.
Eisenman’s The Piranesi Variations comprises three contemporary interpretations of the Campo Marzio drawings—by Eisenman Architects, in New York; architecture critic Jeffrey Kipnis, of The Ohio State University, Columbus; and architect Pier Vittorio Aureli, of DOGMA, in Belgium—and a historical and formal analysis by 12 Yale architecture students who were enrolled in a spring 2012 seminar on Piranesi taught by Mr. Eisenman and School of Architecture Critic Matt Roman (YSoA M.Arch ’09). The project is on view in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini through November 25, 2012.
Piranesi and the Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma Engraver, mapmaker, and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), a native of
Venice, spent much of his adult life in Rome, a city that captured his imagination and contributed to his most influential work. The etchings in the Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma—a time-bending, imaginary rendition of the ancient city—along with his additional studies of Roman ruins and remains, represent a landmark in the shift during the Enlightenment from a traditional antiquarian view of history to a scientific, archaeological one.
Indeed, for Piranesi, archaeological ruins were not part of history, but of a present that he could recombine and reconfigure, thereby turning the “truth” of mapmaking on its head. In the Campo Marzio etchings, for example, only the Pantheon remains at its original site, with other Roman landmarks relocated.
Yale School of Architecture
Internationally recognized as one of the world’s leading centers for the study of architecture and design, the Yale School of Architecture is distinguished by curricular, geographical, and philosophical breadth. The School’s rigorous yet broad-minded approach enables students to develop their individual talents without regard to trends or dogma. Students engage in a diversity of disciplined coursework, complemented by dialogue with eminent scholars, architects, critics, artists, environmentalists, sociologists, and others. Graduates of the School of Architecture include many of the most distinguished and influential architects of the last fifty years.