It is no accident that accomplished draughtsmen, painters & sculptors also became, from the Italian Renaissance onwards, the leading architects of their generation. This remained true even in the latter part of the 20th C. until the advent of CAD & 3D modeling supplanted The Eye & The Brain, and the hand.
Paul GAUGIN never painted from the live model, but always from memory.
Vincenzo SCAMOZZI, Onigo JONES and John VANBURGH, to name but three leading Renaissance architects, were also intimately involved in Court theatre, as political a medium as Architecture ever could be.
But, as modern playwrights & scenarists have amply illustrated, what better object of observation is there but real life ? Here I observe what goes on around me.
Mlle Mezzanine tells the story of a neighbour who used to parade naked in her flat, opposite our bathroom window.
What could serve as a leitmotiv illustration for Arthur SCHNIZTLER’s 1897 play Merry-Go-Round (Reigen, in German, or La Ronde, in French) was in fact provoked by a 2005 holiday season article in Libération on contemporary sexual mores.
It was an interesting theatrical & ‘architectural’ exercise, in the plausibility of imagination and the ability of one’s eye, brain and hand to guage the ‘weightless’ interpenetration of bodies in space. Please don’t be shocked, this is a metaphor of a well-known reality, certainly one in which I grew up as a young lad in Scotland.
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