The Architectural Capriccio

Memory, Fantasy and Invention

Lucien Steil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351894708
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Bringing together leading writers and practicing architects including Jean Dethier, David Mayernik, Massimo Scolari, Robert Adam, David Watkin and Leon Krier, this volume provides a kaleidoscopic, multilayered exploration of the Architectural Capriccio. It not only explains the phenomena within a historical context, but moreover, demonstrates its contemporary validity and appropriateness as a holistic design methodology, an inspiring pictorial strategy, an efficient rendering technique and an optimal didactic tool. The book shows and comments on a wide range of historic masterworks and highlights contemporary artists and architects excelling in a modern updated, refreshed and original tradition of the Capriccio. The capacity of the Capriccio to create an imaginary, imagined or 'analogue' reality by combining and relocating existing or invented buildings and places in uniquely suggestive drawings and paintings offers unprecedented insights in the 'Architectural Mind'. Unlike what the word Capriccio might suggest, it is not 'capricious' but indeed follows complex rules of realism and figuration, as well as coherent narratives and semantics. It is a playful reflection of the dialectics of the real and the ideal. The Capriccio does not challenge the mechanism of reality, but questions the mechanic and linear reading of the real, of life and of art and offers a large palette of threads, figures, tones and nuances to illustrate and contribute creatively to the complexity of a sustainable built and living architectural environment.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Foreword: Capriccio: The Efficacy of Spatial Narrative by Michael Graves
• Preface: The Architectural Capriccio: Memory, Fantasy, Invention by Lucien Steil
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• “Il Capriccio”: Definition of the Capriccio (Caprice) in the French Larousse Dictionary
• Meaning and Purpose of the Capriccio
• The Poietic Image
• The Capricci of Giovanni Paolo Panini
• Patronage in the Golden Age of the Capriccio
• The Grand Tour
• Capriccio, the Leap of the Goat or the Unexpected
• Metaphors for a Political Urban Landscape: Schinkel’s Capricci of a New “Athens-on-the-Spree”
• J.M. Gandy’s Composite Views for John Soane
• American Capriccio: Imaginary Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Painting
• The Capricci of Carl Laubin
• Symmetria and Ethics, the Didactic Capriccio
• Settings: Emily Allchurch and the Old Masters
• Massimo Scolari
• Drawing
• Capriccio
• “Imago Luxemburgi”
• The Capriccio and Poetical Realism
• Urban Chiaroscuro (after Piranesi): Behind the Scenes
• Sublime Architecture: Capricci in Sketchbook and Paintings
• Le Corbusier’s Eye and the Vanishing Point of Modernity
• The Architectural Project: An Homage to Rob Krier
• “La Citta Analoga”: Thoughts on the Urban Capriccio for the Design of Real Cities
• Magical Realism in Miami
• A Very British Capriccio
• Building the Capriccio
• Capricci Capricciosi
• The Double Nature of the Architectural Capriccio: From Pictorial Fiction to Urban Reality
• Postface: “Techne” and Technology
• The Aura of the Computer Generated Image: Or, Virtuosity and the Cult of the Artifact
• Index