Field of Dreams
The Field of Dreams project emerged out of an opportunity to participate in a group show reevaluating the legacy
of the 18th century architect and printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The Piranesi Variations exhibition at the
2012 Venice Biennale, curated by Peter Eisenman, explored the overall 2012 exhibition theme of Common Ground
by revisiting the lasting influence of Piranesi’s fantastic vision of Ancient Rome, the Campo Marzio project of 1762,
on the Architecture discipline’s collective imagination.
The elements of the project included in the Banvard Gallery offer a partial glimpse into the making of the Field of
Dreams project discussed further below. Rather than attempting to reduplicate the installation as it appeared in
Venice we have resisted the totalizing impulse to recapture the project in what we believe to be a critically
different context. Instead, we have chosen to present fragments, sketches, outtakes, false leads and dead ends
from the work as well as production elements, duplicate parts and other photographic and drawing ‘evidence’ of
the actual installation within the context of the larger Piranesi Variations show. Indeed this collection includes
some fragments from the other projects in that exhibit; fragments which have now been absorbed within the
dreamlike character of the Knowlton School of Architecture’s design.
Finally we have attempted to embed the viewer into the experience of the Field of Dreams project by radically
adjusting the scale of some of the representational components of the original design. The Banvard show in this
sense allows each viewer unto the Field of Dreams itself, where the representation of the fragments of the project
are themselves presented within a scaled up version of the figured landscape of the project. In some ways this
reminds us of the original power of the Piranesi project to play with our sense of time, scale and spatiality. It
recapitulates the way in which the disciplinary process of drawing and modeling can produce wonder through the
process of representation itself.
Piranesi, who built little as an architect, still fascinates the discipline exactly because of the way his representations
seem to open up so many possibilities and generate new worlds. It reminds us that the play of scale of drawings
and models typically used in more conventional and mundane ways within architectural practice can in fact
produce a kind of delirium of projected experience. We hope that the dreamlike quality of our updated
understanding of Piranesi’s radical vision can be read within this new context and at the same time that the direct
experience of the representational artifacts can reveal some aspects of the act of creation.
Fielding Mars
An introduction to the Field of Dreams project at the 2012 Venice Biennale
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the plan from Il Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma 1762
John Hejduk’s Victims, 1984
Background
Piranesi’s seminal project, while superficially a product of the nascent archeological impulses of the period, is in
fact a purposeful fictional construct. It is as much about 18th century attitudes toward architecture and urbanism
as it is a glorification of the Roman sources of classical form over those of ancient Greece. In many ways it was an
unprecedented project, as it combined a critique of the methods of cartographic rationality with a romantic vision
of the ancient past and a playful experimentation with architectural typology.
Piranesi's vision has been described as a figure-to-figure urbanism emphasizing individual architectural object
relationships over the usual figure-to-ground duality common in historical representations of the city. Here, like a
vision of cells in a microscope or an archipelago of tightly packed islands, the city is formed out of a complex
saturated field of tangentially arranged elements with no simple organizational structure. The resulting plan,
composed of some historical but mostly imaginary pieces of architecture, is without the underlying structure of
roads and the usual small scale fabric typical of urban spatiality.
Ironically for a city with such a dense and layered history it is devoid of any substantial infrastructure of circulation
or connectivity other than the Tiber itself. Architectural monuments in this representation seem to float free of
their context. Piranesi’s vision therefore can be read as being without the classical datum of ground and rather
produces a dream-like displacement of the city within the continuum of time. These qualities serve to situate the
individual responses of the Piranesi Variations within the suspended and critically framed context of a seemingly
displaced and dislocated idea of ground-making; one that forefronts a possibility of “ground” where the act
“grounding” (and by implication any notion of Common Ground) is curiously attainable only through the
construction of fictional fields.
Four teams were asked to pursue projects for the exhibition; of this group one team set the stage by producing a
thematic reconstruction of the original work and three offered variations on this theme from the perspective of
contemporary ideas within the discipline. The Yale School of Architecture produced the interpretive and thematic
reconstruction of the urban plan; Eisenman Architects produced a speculative diagrammatic overlay for the project
entitled a Field of Diagrams; Dogma imagined a Field of Walls as a latent organizational system within the
imagined city; and finally Kipnis/Oubrerie/Turk and students from the Knowlton School of Architecture
investigated the dreamlike character of Piranesi’s vision through the production of a Field of Dreams, a fictional
tableau exploring issues of architectural figurality and the ‘groundlessness’ of contemporary global culture.
Ungrounding
The Field of Dreams project specifically explored the Campo Marzio legacy on two parallel fronts. The first directly
investigated the implications of Piranesi's destabilization of the ancient authority of ground as outlined above and
produced a speculative interpretation built upon an “ungrounded” urban surface. This was developed through a
critique of the ancient tradition of privileging ground plan relationships over a more fully three dimensional and
figural understanding of architectural form liberated from the earth. Within the project, the mechanism to begin to
question the hegemony of ground was explored through the design of a thick hollow base structure. This construct
represented the Field of Mars as a faceted and porous surface that converted the solidity of ground to a kind of
voided screen.
A sense of a mutable and insubstantial ground was produced by flipping the white and black color scheme of
typical urban figure-to-ground cartographic conventions so that the implied solidity indicated by dark poche in
historic urban plans was inverted from solid to void in the model. The model undercarriage, revealed through the
holes of the faceted surface, was blackened so that each void in the screened surface creates a perceptual
ambiguity between solid and negative conditions; a technique that effectively confounds both simple figure-toground and figure-to-figure readings of the scheme.
Indeed, from certain vantage points the figural pattern of the holed surface can be read as emergent architectural
objects and at others as voids in the surface. This served to suggest a complex netherworld existing just below the
surface from which architectural elements can emerge or be absorbed into at any point. This “underworld”
became a major thematic device in underpinning a sense of theatricality in the deployment of the architectural
characters populating the surface. It is also a reference to Piranesi’s famous interest in the tombs, catacombs,
prisons and other archeological remains hidden beneath the city of Rome.
Finally the overall configuration of the patterned ground screen borrowed from the history of painting, particularly
from the genre of didactic landscape tableaux where the denizens of Hell, Earth and Heaven are presented within
a vertically unfolding vista of ground and sky. Like a painting of Hieronymus Bosch, the screen’s decorative nature
suggests thematic conditions for various zones of inhabitation with the human and monstrous figures replaced
with reimagined architectural elements playing upon the surface. The ‘ground’ screen therefore becomes coded
as, for instance, when a transforming star pattern covers an area designated as Heaven and a geometric unfolded
“shadow” pattern covers an area encompassing Hell. The architectural figures inserted into these areas thus
participate in a kind of morality play where their movement across the surface exists between the dream-like
veiled layers of Heaven and Hell.
Figuring
In a direct homage to the architect John Hejduk, the other major avenue of investigation pursued by the project
team explored the figural implications of architectural objects themselves, especially as they could be seen as
liberated from the planimetrics of the urban field. Effectively the strategy was based on Hejduk’s Victims project of
1984, the plan of which features a number of enigmatic figural objects corralled into a bounded Berlin site and
organized through a set of apparently informal and tangential relationships. The informal nature of the plan
dispositions in the Hejduk scheme has a remarkable affinity with the Campo Marzio project but without the packed
density Piranesi deployed to suggest the nature of the ancient city. The resultant “urban” condition of the Hejduk
project, irrespective of the meaning for which it was originally deployed (as a memorial Masque to the victims of
the Holocaust), emphasizes both the individual figural characteristics of each element within the bounded
envelope of the site and the way urban fabric can be viewed as the result of the multiplicity of object-to-object
relationships. Urban space in this abstract sense is less the result of an anonymous fabric of building form than it is
of the unique expressions of the large cast of characters that make up a city. The individual to collective conditions
in Hejduk’s project thus stand in for larger notions of the importance of an individual’s role in a collective society.
In a similar way to Hejduk’s Victims project, the Field of Dreams presents a large collection of architectural
characters inhabiting the “ungrounded” site of the reimagined Campo Marzio. Piranesi’s scheme specifically
referenced experimental architecture from his own period and he anachronistically inserted these references into
his fictional reconstruction. The Field of Dreams project sought to update this logic by utilizing a contemporary
catalog of references mobilized in an analogous way. The project does this by inserting a set of ‘cartooned’ and
comically transformed versions of contemporary precedents into an updated Campo Marzio field.
The ‘cartoon’ collection of architectural precedents was chosen for how they exemplified a volumetric and spatial
figurality independent from the authority of ground. In a manner much the same as Hejduk’s late work, the
building characters were transformed into a set of puppet-like game-players uprooted from the ground and set in
motion across the urban landscape. The screened surface of the model was thus populated in a way reminiscent of
the tableau paintings mentioned earlier. Emphasis in the organization of these elements was on a dynamic
freedom of movement within the representation of the ancient city. Indeed, in a direct pun with the meaning of
the site of the Campo Marzio, which was the historical location of the martial training grounds of the Roman
Legion, these groupings were ordered into “marches” that formed the thematic organization of the entire project
composition.