San Antonio College Library

The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture Pier Vittorio Aureli. In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city. Aureli uses the term absolute not in the conventional sense of "pure," but to denote something that is resolutely itself after being separated from its other. In the pursuit...

"The engraver and designer Giovanni Battista Piranesi published this lively three-part defense of Roman architectural "invention" in 1765, just as the "beautiful and noble simplicity" of ancient Greek art was becoming a tenet of Western aesthetics. An impassioned plea for a Roman-Style eclecticism that draws freely on all artistic forms and traditions, Piranesi's Observations anticipates the contemporary debate between devotees of a rational, minimal...