Representations of Architecture

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Buildings have served artists as settings, subjects and dreams. The anonymous Ideal City panel in Urbino (c. 1480) lays out a perfectly symmetrical piazza with no people in sight, a demonstration of perspective as much as a view. Pieter Saenredam measured and drew Dutch church interiors before painting them as pale, airy spaces, and Canaletto made the palaces and canals of Venice into precise, sunlit views.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi etched the ruins of Rome at overwhelming scale and invented endless vaults and stairways in his Carceri, or imaginary prisons, reworked in 1761. Giorgio de Chirico's arcaded squares of the 1910s turn architecture into a stage for unease. Photography gave modern buildings their public image: Julius Shulman's Case Study House #22 (1960) floats a glass living room over the lights of Los Angeles. The Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez built brightly coloured paper and card models of imagined cities.