After successful completion of the course, students are able to express their own perception and acknnowledgement of existing architecture through the rhetorical tradition of ekphrasis as a mode of description.
During a five day trip to the vicinity of Naples, we will explore the mathematics of exuberance in the great palace of Caserta, which counts as the largest building erected in Europe in the eighteenth century. Begun in 1752 for the Carlo di Borbone, King of the Two Sicilies, Caserta became an archetypal expression of absolute monarchy. It provides the perfect site to study the relationship between absolutism and baroque mathematics. We will study the intellectual background of its conception, and attempt to endow the manifest relationships between poetry (painted and sculpted allegories) and number (architectural planning that has become a geometrical play) of the palace with fresh vivacity: through exphrasic descriptions of the palace, the gardens, and any kind of remarkable details we might find.
Visits on site, input lectures, discussions, individual writing and presentation in the group. A reader with background literature will be provided, and our main "orientation" will be derived from the following book:
George L. Hersey, Architecture, Poetry and Number in the Royal Palace at Caserta (MIT Press, 1983).
The excursion is offered as a joint event in combination with the ATTP research trip 2020. We have a limited number of 6 places for interested students. Please write to us with a personal motivation no later than March 3: office@attp.tuwien.ac.at. Students who have absolved our Module Meta Architecture will be given priority (but not exclusively so), since this excursion is about learning to apply the skills trained in the different courses of the module.
WHEN: Sunday May 3 to Friday May 8 2020
Approx. Costs for Students: ca 400 Euro.
Our house for the trip is located near Naples, and it offers generous space for seminars, lectures, cooking and eating, individual concentration as well as colloquial chatting and discussions – always with a view to the Volcano Visuvius.
We will collect our contributions and organise them into a booklet – it is expected that all participants will actively participate in this research endeavour.
