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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. — Artnet
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... View full entry
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. — MIT News
"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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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.
— BBC
Meanwhile in San Francisco, owners of the leaning Millennium Tower are far less eager to turn their tilting property into a tourist magnet. View full entry
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. — history.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:Gaudí’s uncompleted masterpiece will finally be finished—in iceIceCave Iceland is a city in the glacierFrank Gehry designs "Icehenge" desk for Inland Steel in Chicago View full entry
"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." — online.wsj.com
