CategoriesArtistic Disciplines
Architecture
Buildings in art: architectural drawings, models and prints, and paintings and photographs that take buildings and cities as their subject.
5 works · 10 related artists
About
Architecture enters art in two ways: through the drawings, models and prints that architects make to imagine buildings, and through artists who use buildings as subjects or stage sets. In 15th-century Florence the two were close. Filippo Brunelleschi engineered the cathedral dome and demonstrated linear perspective, and Leon Battista Alberti wrote a treatise on building. Donato Bramante's small Tempietto in Rome (about 1502) became a model of classical harmony.
In the 18th century Giovanni Battista Piranesi etched both the ruins of Rome and the vast, impossible stairways of his Imaginary Prisons. Photography later gave a new record of the built world, from Eugène Atget's empty Paris streets to Bernd and Hilla Becher's grids of water towers. Giorgio de Chirico painted deserted arcades heavy with shadow, Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building in Dessau (1925–26) made glass and steel a manifesto, and Bodys Isek Kingelez built colourful model cities of the future.
