We recently presented José Juan Barba's latest book: Invenciones: Nueva York vs. Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Piranesi. A thorough analysis of Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi and great printmaker G.B. Piranesi's work and drawings which aims to reveal new relations and connections between their work and ideas.
We would like to invite you all to this event in which the author will be accompanied by historian Francisco Javier Gómez Espelosín, architect Pilar Chias and architect Luis Fernández-Galiano, who introduces the book with a preface entitled "Black Brains".
We would like to invite you all to this event in which the author will be accompanied by historian Francisco Javier Gómez Espelosín, architect Pilar Chias and architect Luis Fernández-Galiano, who introduces the book with a preface entitled "Black Brains".
The launch will take place on Wednesday 6 May at 7:30pm at CSIC Scientific Bookshop (c/ Duque de Medinaceli, 6. Madrid).
'Inventions' was the title of an exhibition held in Hannover in 1981 which gathered together graphic work by different architects around the work of G.B. Piranesi. The drawings displayed here were not intended to reflect the pre-construction phase but to establish a metalinguistic discourse. The exhibition seeked to identify a non-textual narrative as powerful as the Venetian architect and able to suggest new points of view for architecture in a moment of crisis.
The bicentennial celebration of Piranesi's death took place only three years before Hannover's exhibition, in 1978. It revealed two different ways of understanding his work, a first approach that strictly referred to style and a second and more interesting metalinguistic interpretation. Besides, two of the books that best reflect our contemporaneity were published during this three-year period between both exhibitions: Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas and The Manhattan Transcripts by Bernard Tschumi.
The bicentennial celebration of Piranesi's death took place only three years before Hannover's exhibition, in 1978. It revealed two different ways of understanding his work, a first approach that strictly referred to style and a second and more interesting metalinguistic interpretation. Besides, two of the books that best reflect our contemporaneity were published during this three-year period between both exhibitions: Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas and The Manhattan Transcripts by Bernard Tschumi.
Just like Piranesi moved from Venezia to Rome, these two European architects went from London to the Rome of our time, Manhattan, in order to develop, exhibit and present a new way of understanding contemporary architecture in a time of crisis and uncertainty.
In Architecture, most of the views and discourses outlining what happened during this decade have been presented as negative processes: the end of Modernity or the consolidation of the stylistic disintegration that gave way to 'Po-Mo' or postmodernism. This book seeks to outline a different vision, far removed from pristine views and selective scientific approaches, that presents more contemporary views, sometimes retroactive and always more complex, inclusive and nearer to reality. Architecture visions which include the observers, the users. A presentation of the Architecture of places, as opposed to the architecture of prisms and solids.
