Tag: Emotionality of Architecture

The emotionality of architecture is as real as the stone, steel and glass that forms the outer shell of a building.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at the studies in my diary entry Love Among the Ruins, the drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi emotive as they portray the archaeological site at Pæstum in its dilapidated state as sensitively as anyone could. Piranesi died before he could finish the set of etchings, which were grouped under the title Différents vues de Pesto, leaving his son Francesco to finish and published them.

Thanks to Sir John Soane’s acquisition of fifteen of the seventeen surviving Pæstum drawings in 1817, I was able to see them—restored and on view at the Morgan Library & Museum here in New York City, their debut in the United States. The visual narratives go beyond documenting the architecture; they illustrate the world that was being lived around it at the time. I could almost feel the stone cracking, the blocks of marble sinking deeper into the earth as the peasants lolled in the shadows of the colossal columns. It was as if the delineations of sunlight and shadow adjusted themselves along the striated surfaces of the edifices as I watched, the morning moving toward afternoon. It was a feeling I will never forget—that’s the emotionality of architecture.