Archinect - News

Artist JR 'cracks open' Florence's Palazzo Strozzi with monumental optical illusion installation

2021-03-22T19:10:00-04:00

Titled La Ferita, Italian for “The Wound,” the work creates an optical illusion of a great gash running through the institution’s external walls. Through the cracks, those on the outside can once again peer into a black-and-white vision of the interior of the shuttered building, with some of Florence’s famous artworks and cultural heritage on view.

The new site-specific trompe-l'œil installation — measuring 28 meters/92 feet tall and 33 meters/108 feet wide — by prolific French artist JR opened on March 19, shortly after many major Italian cities were ordered back under another COVID-19 lockdown.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Palazzo Strozzi (@palazzostrozzi)

"By including iconic works of Florence’s art heritage and directly citing real places such as the library of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, JR proposes a direct and evocative reflection on accessibility not only to Palazzo Strozzi but to all cultural sites in the era of Covid-19," explains the project description.

Related on Archinect: How Art and Design Museums Switched to Working From Home and Sharpened Their Digital Experience. Photo: Wikimedia Commons user BRENAC/CC-BY-SA-3.0.

"Palazzo Strozzi becomes the spectacular stage for a symbolic yet painful wound suffered by all cultural institutions both in Italy and abro...

Exploring the difference between history and memory in Renaissance architecture

2020-12-08T14:57:00-05:00

ElDante Winston [...] PhD student in MIT’s History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art program is keenly interested in how spaces designed for violence retain a memory of violent acts in the present day.

"These are places of violence that, when you go to them now, you just watch people mill around and eat gelato," ElDante Winston, a PhD student in MIT's History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art program, says about certain, prominent examples of Renaissance architecture, the subject of his research. "But years ago, someone was hanging right in the center of the piazza, if they weren’t decapitated. And we don’t really think about that, and what that means for the space."

Princeton University researchers crack secret to Italian renaissance dome construction

2020-05-22T17:44:00-04:00

As part of a recent study, researchers at Princeton University and the University of Bergamo have uncovered the engineering techniques behind the self-supporting masonry of the Italian renaissance, reports the Princeton Engineering website. "Researchers analyzed how cupolas like the famous duomo, part of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, were built as self-supporting, without the use of shoring or forms typically required," the school writes.

"The double loxodrome is comprised of rows of vertical bricks that crisscross around the dome and are filled in by horizontal bricks. Effectively, each course of bricks creates a structural element known as a plate-bande that wedges interior bricks between the vertical end caps." Image: courtesy of the researchers. via engineering.princeton.edu

Looking at structures such as the famous Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, which is the largest masonry dome standing today, the team was able to discover an intricate geometric pattern...

Leaning Tower of Pisa now actually a bit straighter

2018-11-26T13:39:00-05:00

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is known worldwide for its precarious tilt - but now experts have revealed it's going straight. The tower's Surveillance Group, which monitors restoration work, said the landmark is "stable and very slowly reducing its lean." The 57m (186ft) medieval monument has been straightened by 4cm (1.5in) over the past two decades, the team said. "It's as if it's had two centuries taken off its age," Professor Salvatore Settis explained.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, owners of the leaning Millennium Tower are far less eager to turn their tilting property into a tourist magnet.

Rejected Leonardo da Vinci design will finally come to life as world’s longest ice bridge

2016-01-06T13:32:00-05:00

In 1502, at the request of the Turkish sultan, Leonardo da Vinci came up with the design for a stone bridge that would cross the Golden Horn [...]. With a span of some 240 meters, it would have been the longest bridge in the world—if it had been built. Now, more than 500 years after the sultan rejected da Vinci’s design, a team of students and volunteers in the Finnish town of Juuka are in the process of constructing a scale model of the original drawing—out of ice.

Exhibition Review: 'Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Paintings'

2014-07-10T12:57:00-04:00

"Buildings in paintings have too often been viewed as background or as space fillers which play a passive or at best supporting role, propping up the figures that carry the main message of the picture. By looking afresh at buildings within paintings, treating them as active protagonists, it becomes clear that they performed a series of crucial roles."