Introduction
Welcome to University of Washington Libraries Special Collections exhibit, Invisible cities: The Prints of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the Art of the Built Environment. In this exhibit, you will see the work of Piranesi and treasures from the Book Arts and Architectural Drawings collections.
The exhibit explores the relationship between imagined and built spaces and celebrates the preservation of cultural imagination. Accompanying the prints are pieces from the UW Libraries Architectural Drawings Collection and work from the College of Built Environments. Together these pieces show the continuum between Piranesi’s conception of the built environment and the vision of current and former students of the University of Washington.
Collections
Book Arts and Rare Books
The Special Collections Book Arts and Rare Books Collection comprises rare and unique print materials, archival collections, and art objects. The collection represents historical and modern pieces encompassing all aspects of the physical book: typography, paper making, print technology, illustration, book design, paper decoration, calligraphy, sculptural and conceptual work, and artist’s books. We have major holdings documenting the history of the book, historical children’s literature, 17th to modern literature, 19th century American literature, and more. The Piranesi prints on display are part of the historical prints and broadsides collections and accompany collections in the Architectural drawing collection bequeathed by the Gould family.
Historic Architectural Drawings
The architecture collections at Special Collections contain records from over 400 architects in 250 discrete collections. These collections document the contributions of architects, landscape architects, and engineers working in the Pacific Northwest between the 1880s and the present day. Over 250,000 original drawings include the entirety of the design process from early studies and conceptual sketches to final renderings and construction drawings. These collections also include project files, specifications, business records, personal papers, promotional photographs, and other materials. Special Collections is the largest repository of this kind in the Pacific Northwest region.
The Future of Our Spaces
Accompanying the prints from UW Special Collections are current faculty and student work from the College of Built Environments here at the University of Washington. Three faculty members were kind enough to offer some of their and their students work to be on display today.
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Daniel Winterbottom
Professor of Landscape Architecture
University of Washington, College of Built Environments
Daniel Winterbottom, RLA, FASLA, a landscape architect with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tufts University and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington. His firm, Winterbottom Design Inc., focuses their practice on healing/restorative gardens. His research interests include the landscape as a cultural expression, ecological urban design and the role of restorative/healing landscapes in the built environment. He has been published widely in Northwest Public Health, Places, the New York Times, Seattle Times, Seattle P.I., Landscape Architecture Magazine. He has authored “Wood in the Landscape” and has contributed to several books on sustainable design, community gardens, therapeutic landscapes and community service learning.
On display in the exhibit are several of his watercolor paintings and ink drawings showing the shifting landscape of Seattle during the tumultuous year of 2020. Like Piranesi, Winterbottom captures the beauty of blended spaces; the industrial and institutional power of the Seattle skyline in contrast to the informality of the encampments. In addition, the work of student Stephanie Roh from studios taught by Winterbottom are on display in the exhibit.
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Catherine DeAlmeda
Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture
University of Washington, College of Built Environments
Trained as a landscape architect and building architect, Catherine’s research examines the materiality and performance of waste landscapes through exploratory methods in design research and practice. Her work has ranged in scale from large bio-cultural and sacred indigenous landscapes, to site design and architectural work, to furniture design and materials research. Through her design work, research, teaching and engagement, she explores ways of creating multiplicity within a single entity, space, building or site to form greater efficiencies and performative capabilities in design. Since 2014, Catherine has developed her design research—landscape lifecycles—as a holistic approach that synthesizes multiple programs, forming hybrid assemblages in the transformation of waste landscapes and materials. She uses landscape lifecycles as a framework for investigating the performance, visibility, citizenships, emotions and injustices of waste materials and landscapes.
Catherine received her MLA from Harvard University and her BARCH from Pratt Institute. She is a certified remote drone pilot, an Honorary Member of the Tau Sigma Delta Honor Society in Architecture and Allied Arts, and a Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies. Her work has been supported by numerous grants, and recognized in national and international publications and media outlets, including the Landscape Research Record, Journal of Landscape Architecture, and Journal of Architectural Education.
In the Urban Sites Studio led by DeAlmeida, students in landscape architecture take inspiration from the Italo Calvino novel, Invisible Cities, to create their own imagined spaces.
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Nat Gregorius
Masters in Landscape Architecture
(In)Visible Cycles of Leonia
Created in LARCH 402 Urban Sites Studio Winter 2022
This project was an exploration in the translation of a 2D composition into a 3D spatial landscape where we applied a chosen story from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities to guide our spatial compositions, narratives, and 2D drawings we derived from our 3D models. An iterative design process was key in project evolution as we learned new physical and digital mediums. The challenge of this project was not having a specified site but rather creating our own site that exists as a “slice” in an overall greater landscape - an exercise in thinking beyond boundaries and limitations.
Both my 2D and 3D compositions were spatially addressing the concept of cycles through asking myself how can I visualize a process we see as non-linear with either orthogonal shapes or through the lifting, ventilating, extruding, and perforating of a single continuous surface. I derived the concept of cycle from the Invisible Cities story I chose - Leonia is a city that is in a constant cycle of consuming new materials while seemingly getting rid of the old which is only just taken away to the edges of the city, an ever building landform of waste. My 3D model and 2D digital drawings aim to imagine what this periphery waste landscape looks like and how it is in direct conversation with our own waste reality.
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Malka Hoffman
Masters in Landscape Architecture
Armilla: Channeling and Inhabiting Landscapes Beyond the Binary
Created in LARCH 402 Urban Sites Studio Winter 2022
This project was created through L ARCH 402: Urban Sites Studio. We explored the fundamentals in design elements + principles through 2D and 3D form. I draw inspiration from Italo Calvino’s book, Invisible Cities, as well as an existing public space in Montreal, Canada.
Armilla is a city described by Italo Calvino as a place with “no walls, no ceilings, no floors...except the water pipes that rise vertically... and spread out horizontally” (Calvino, 49). The author continues, “At any hour, raising your eyes among the pipes, you are likely to glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stature, luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at a mirror.” (Calvino, 49).
I came to realize that the story of Armilla purpetiated harmful narratives of cis-hetero-normativity, patriarchy, and the male gaze, and decided to explore what it could be like to instead design how landscapes could be liberatory and exist beyond the binary. My fantastical and speculative post-industrial design uses water as well as the idea of channeling (to draw attention to) and inhabiting (taking up space) through forms that mimic underground city piping systems. What the users are doing in this space are embodied principles of queer ecologies and eco-feminist theory: collective care, joy, and resting as a form of resistance to this toxic culture dominating not only the story, but our society as a whole.
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Brian McLaren
Associate Professor of Architecture
University of Washington, College of Built Environments
Professor McLaren’s teaching and scholarship is influenced by an ongoing interest in contemporary critical theory as well as postcolonial studies. The broad focus of his concerns have been on the relationship between architecture and politics during the Fascist period in Italy, with particular attention to the tensions that linked modernism and regional expression. His dissertation research and initial publications concentrated on the colonial context of Libya and especially the relationship between modern architecture and local culture under the auspices of tourism. Additionally, he examines the intersection of modern architecture, race and biopolitics in Italy during the late fascist era, with a particular attention to the manner in which concerns for racial prestige that existed in Italian Africa, and policies developed for their amelioration, were brought back to Italy. This work resulted in the publication of two essays in edited volumes—”Architecture during Wartime: The Mostra d’Oltremare and Esposizione Universale di Roma,” Spatial Violence, edited by Andrew Herscher and Anooradha Siddiqi (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), and “Modern architecture and racial eugenics at the Esposizione Universale di Roma,” in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, edited by Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II and Mabel O. Wilson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). The larger project from which these essays were drawn has just recently been published as Modern Architecture, Empire and Race in Fascist Italy (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2021), on display in this exhibit.
McLaren teaches The Rome Studio which offers an in-depth investigation of the city through the succession of layers that have shaped its urban form. The specific focus is on the historical and contemporary impact of moments of crisis, with particular attention to systems of infrastructure and accommodation that provide for the health and safety of Rome's citizens. The course aims to use the city of Rome as a case study for understanding the challenge of designing buildings in a historically and culturally specific urban context, as well as in response to the primary theme of health and human safety. At the end of the class students will have developed a more critical approach to design. The final projects of Nicole Messner-Cousins and Wei Yu Liao, students from this class, are on display in the exhibit.