In Defense of
PAPER ARCHITECTURE

David Mayernik
July 2005

 
It may be a unique quality of this particular renaissance of the classical tradition, which has flowered nowhere quite as broadly (nor as profitably) as in America, that the epithet “paper architect” is considered so devastatingly pejorative. With the building boom of the nineties now extended into the new millennium, creating projects that live only on paper seems foolish, if not cowardly. Convinced as we are that we operate in a meritocracy, we assume that good ideas should not only float to the surface, they should be built; if a project can’t find its way off the paper, it must have little merit. Or else, from another (related) perspective, projects intended solely to live on paper either aren’t addressing real problems, or their author isn’t sensible enough to have figured out how to earn a living building buildings. None of these points of view acknowledge the very real fact that the opportunities afforded classicists today are confined to a relatively narrow sphere—mostly private homes, or some occasional, widely-scattered institutional buildings, etc—one that affords little opportunity to explore the great themes that mark the work of the greatest architects in the classical tradition. We could all simply accept the apparently little-disputed notion that one builds a renaissance from the ground up, little by little acquiring credibility to accede to greater and greater opportunities, if it were not for the fact that the Renaissance happened in decidedly the opposite way, i.e. top down, with one of the first Renaissance projects also one of the greatest: Brunelleschi’s dome of Sta. Maria del Fiore. This might be a commentary more on the nature of today’s patrons than of our architects, but it could be argued that cultural credibility comes more often from thinking big thoughts than small ones, and without that credibility no access to the great opportunities will ever be forthcoming.

          I am particularly interested in two notable eras of paper architecture, the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, both in Italy. In the first, theorists of the early humanist Renaissance sought to articulate an ideal architecture that hadn’t seen the light of day since the Roman Empire, and while buildings were being built in what might be called a hybrid classicism the theorists could only articulate their ideal on paper (or with oil on panel) while they searched for patrons who might build it. Paper architecture, in the form of treatises, ideal projects, paintings, and perhaps the greatest ever paper construct, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, strove to be more rigorous, more impressive, and more all’ antica than what was being built. In the eighteenth century two factors coincided in Rome to usher in perhaps the greatest era of paper architecture—the Concorso Clementino at the Accademia di San Luca, and the dearth of building opportunities in the city as the century wore on. In the case of the fifteenth century, it was the desire to be at the leading edge of architectural thought that motivated architects to commit projects to paper, while in the eighteenth it was the disparity between the wealth of skilled architects and the poverty of opportunities that doomed designs to remain drawings only. In neither case did paper architects prefer their condition; indeed, most dreamed of realizing their ambitious projects, and probably thought of them as virtually real. No one chose to be a paper architect, but projects on paper were better than none at all. The freedom to dream, in any case, afforded opportunities for thought more rigorous (because not conditioned by awkward sites or patron whims) and more adventurous than what could be achieved in bricks and mortar (perhaps only Bernardo Vittone built more interesting buildings than he drew).

          Palladio, we should recall, made no graphic distinction in his Four Books between his projects that were built and those that were not—the printed medium meant that all were presented in the same way, as lines on paper. The architectural idea was the same in either case. Piranesi, his fellow Venetian, often signed his engravings of other architects’ buildings with the title architetto, while his two commissioned building projects never made it to engravings; and of those two, it was the one that wasn’t built (the tribune of S. Giovanni in Laterano) that brought from him perhaps the most beautiful architectural drawings ever produced.

          So, while we all have to make a living, paper projects should not be disdained; in those centuries of the greatest advances in architectural thinking the work of architects that remained on paper had a deeply resonant effect on the built work of their contemporaries and successors. It is only in the last ten years or so, as classicists have found more opportunities to build, that ambitious theoretical projects have almost disappeared from publications, lectures, and exhibits; and while much good work is being built, we are not yet afforded the great opportunities of a Palladio or a Bernini: and so perhaps we should not be so ready to abandon the one vehicle for exploring the best of the tradition, for testing ourselves against the peak of Parnassus. Paper architecture, I would argue, may yet for a time be the greatest legacy we leave our successors, and the paradoxical path to opportunities to eventually build great things.

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figure 1.

          I began thinking about paper projects for real sites while a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. My focus on the via della Conciliazione and the Piazza of St. Peter’s led me to study the impact of the papal Possesso processional route through the city as a catalyst to urban design projects. Since the Possesso linked St. Peter’s with the Lateran, my commitment to repairing the damage to the urban fabric and its meaning between the Ponte Sant’ Angelo and St. Peter’s would inevitably lead me to the other end of the Possesso route. My more recent project for the Lateran neighborhood addresses both the site’s practical problems and its iconographic opportunities. [FIGURE 1] Managing vehicular traffic is the most obvious problem, which is accomplished by channeling cars through a better-defined network of streets and piazze that both calms and reduces traffic. Re-calibrating the scale of Piazza San Giovanni at the basilica’s northwest end, by extending the ancient hospital to the west with a semi-circular wing, not only humanizes the space, it also redefines the boundaries of the piazza, giving it greater coherence. All of this is to improve an already rich assemblage of elements, but at the East front it is an absence of any urban form at all that poses the real challenge. Here, an oval piazza echoes St. Peter’s while transforming Bernini’s space in several ways: at San Giovanni, the oval is rotated 90° to extend the basilica’s axis toward nearby S. Croce; the colonnade that surrounds the piazza is raised above amphitheater seating, making the ancient source more overt and the modern space useful; and the piazza is filled with a shallow pool, alluding to John’s baptisms in the Jordan. The “amphitheater” and the nearby Scala Santa are embedded in new urban fabric. From this new Piazza Giordano, a via crucis makes the connection to the ancient basilica of S. Croce in Gerusalemme (whose name suggests we are anagogically transported to Jerusalem by means of the relic of the cross and actual soil from the Holy Land kept in the basilica), which also gets a redefined piazza. [FIGURE 2] S. Croce was redesigned not long after Galilei’s project for San Giovanni, and the former’s convex façade wrapped around an oval atrium fuses aspects of both the Lateran and the Vatican to a dynamic late Baroque composition, providing an energetic coda to the connections we have made across Rome. Seen framed through the last bay of a gateway building illustrated with scenes derived from Piero della Francesca’s Invention of the True Cross frescoes in Arezzo, S. Croce at last finds itself in a supportive urban context that weaves it together with the adjacent Amphiteatrum Castrense and the Musical Instruments museum.

figure 2.