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Category: {architecture}
Architecture
Pyramid mausoleum
Blickling Park, Norfolk, England. Built by Joseph Bonomi in 1796–7.
Archigram
In late 1960, in various flats in Hampstead, a loose group of people started to meet: to criticize projects, to concoct letters to the press, to make competition projects, and generally prop one another up against the boredom of working in London architectural offices. The main British magazines of the time did not publish student work and Archigram was responding to this as much as to the sterility of the scene. The title Archigram came from the notion of a more simple and urgent item than a Journal, like a telegram or aerogramme – hence, “archi(tecture)-gram”.
The art of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1781–1841
Cathedral Towering over a Town (1813).
Karl Friedrich Schinkel was a German painter and Neo-Classical architect. These paintings, produced early in his career, strongly resemble those of his contemporary Caspar David Friedrich, using landscape as a metaphor and with a similar attention to the quality of natural light. Apparently Schinkel thought too much of the resemblance; after seeing Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea he decided he could never equal Friedrich’s mastery and so concentrated solely on architecture. The picture below of the Queen of the Night is a design for Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Mercury Rev used the painting on the cover of their Secret for a Song single.
Morning (1813).
Medieval City on a River (1815).
The Queen of the Night (1816).
The Banks of the Spree near Stralau (1817).
Charles Méryon’s Paris
Charles Méryon (1821–1868) made his name producing etchings of the city of Paris, and became as accomplished at rendering the solidity of architecture as Piranesi. Méryon manages to do for the City of Light what Piranesi did for the Eternal City with his famous Vedute di Roma, celebrating the buildings whilst paying careful attention to the glamour of deterioration. I looked at the work of Méryon and Piranesi a great deal when embarking on my Lovecraft adaptations and still regret not buying an expensive (for the time) book of Méryon’s work in the late 1980s. Happily there are plenty of museum websites with his etchings in their collections.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive