Dystopia: from the Carceri to Ecstacity

Abstract

This research report looks at the work of Italian Baroque, architect/engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-I778), and its interpretation by contemporary Italian architecture critic/historian Manfredo Tafuri (b.1935), Other appropriate writers are also considered It first explains Tafuri's understanding of history and then analyses Piranesi's etchings, principally the Carceri. Finally it compares this understanding of Piranesi's dystopian images with those provided by Hugh Ferriss and contemporary architects, Lebbeus Woods, Shin Takamatsu, Nigel Coates and Aldo Rossi. It attempts to not only confirm the historical link with Piranesi but also show that the issues raised by Piranesi's etchings (at least according to contemporary analysis) are similar to those addressed in some recent designs. Further, it also explains the reasoning behind these images and come to some conclusion as to the nature and definition of dystopia. It shows that Piranesi was the first to realise and demonstrated the ultimate inability of architecture to escape from the capitalist system. He criticises the false naturalism and rationalism of the eighteenth century city. This is revealed in the Carceri, with its torture machines and irrational spatial treatment. Piranesi demonstrates that architecture no longer has any autonomy, it can no longer hold on to its own ideology the face of capitalism and shows this with an architectural language derived from a collage of elements. It is a language that is not truly silent, but rather unable to speak due to its eclectivity. This silence is an attempt to escape from "the system", which the twentieth century architects discussed also demonstrate the virtual impossibility of escape, and it is this failure that reads as dystopia.