Narrative Architecture - Design: A Dream

“Design: A Dream” was held as a specialization module in the summer semester 2023 and focused on the enigmatic Renaissance novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) as a design tool by analyzing its architectural realization by the Milanese architect and stage designer Tomaso Buzzi (1900-1981) in Montegiove, Italy. La Scarzuola, the architectural complex built between 1958 and 1978 around a medieval monastery, was conceived by Buzzi as a built urban utopia – a “città ideale” – in which the complex dream tale of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, with its fantastic characters, excessive architectural fantasies and games of linguistic confusion take on concrete architectural expression, thus blurring the boundaries between dreamed, narrated and built form. Using architectural quotes from antiquity, he reconstructs but also deconstructs historical historical examples of the urban. 

Conceived as a non-exhaustive structure without a defined centre or clear boundaries, the ideal city was conceived as a city permanently under construction. Together with the students we have approached Buzzi’s city in the periphery for observations and continuations of this design project, using the same literary and constructive frame of reference: the dream structures narrated in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The students were asked to select an architectural ekphrasis from the German translation of the Hypnerotomachia and apply it to one of the structures of La Scarzuola. Finally, they translated their design into a cardboard model.

Modell Photography: Marija Lovrić / Picture Editing: Petra Eckhard