Close
Research
Subject
After Michelangelo, A Contemporary Baroque聽
Abstract
Dominique Barri猫re, engraver and painter, recalled seeing an architectural treatise by Michelangelo 鈥渕any times鈥� while working in Borromini鈥檚 workshop. Barri猫re stated that the treatise contained 鈥渕any beautiful lessons in architecture鈥�, with Michelangelo concluding 鈥渢he best lessons were those of the architect鈥檚 own genius鈥�. Paradoxically, the treatise argued for its own rules to be transgressed in its teaching of originality.
Last seen in the 17th century, the treatise holds a modern significance due to its oppositional axioms. Later, discussions of style, such as W枚lfflin鈥檚 Renaissance and Baroque (1888) and Principles of Art History (1915), retrieved the Baroque from the realm of aberration, through codifying a set of stylistic features which were previously considered as unguided. Such studies outlined the Baroque鈥檚 logic to be a willed corruption of key Renaissance ideas, such as harmony, planarity and austerity.
This design research project aims to resituate Michelangelo鈥檚 thinking within the Baroque as its very instigator, away from a current positioning within architectural mannerism and the High Renaissance. An investigation into his missing treatise will re-evaluate the significance of his work for contemporary architectural design. It argues that Michelangelo鈥檚 architectural designs show how Baroque thinking transposes time, space and representation into a cyclical-historical model of design.
Through the enabling of a new style via its active corruption of the existing, an 鈥榦bjective鈥� Baroque logic can be transposed to modern day practice as the grounds for an oppositional design methodology. Rather than debating its existence, this research will attempt to reconstruct Michelangelo鈥檚 lost text as part of a speculative design method. The Baroque, and the logic for its emergence, is to be recast through a theory of design, aesthetics and art.
References will be made to the aesthetic and materialist continental philosophies of Nietzsche, Bataille, and current speculative realist philosophy.
Biography
Daniel James Wilkinson completed his MArch at The Bartlett in 2014 and has taught architecture at both The University of Hong Kong and London South Bank University.聽