Prisca Thielmann
Tuesday 13 January 2009, 6:30pm
Prisca Thielmann - Building Ruins
Opening Lecture to Prisca Thielmann’s exhibition Underground palaces, paper ruins, garden follies.
Hadrian’s Villa is a paradigm for an architecture which actively encourages new interpretations. The emperor’s country retreat – an ornate palace at the scale of a small city – has become a vast ruin embedded in a magical pastoral landscape. Its paradigmatic status is the result both of its mythic beauty and its ruination. Its imperfect, fragmented nature has repeatedly fascinated artists and architects and has led to a multitude of readings and built interpretations.Generations of architects have returned to Hadrian’s Villa for inspiration. Piranesi and the Adam brothers chose to record the ruins; Beaux Arts scholars developed reconstructions; Borromini drew inspiration from an imagined ‘original’; Kahn and Le Corbusier reinterpreted the ‘villa as ruin’.
Prisca Thielmann went on a Grand Tour to Rome to follow the traces of the Villa’s myth. Her work dissects this romantic dream into its architectural elements – spatial ideas, atmosphere and surface qualities – and translates them into new contexts. Her collages, models and photographs show imagined poetical spaces, at once anachronistic, open-ended, hypothetical and specific.
Prisca Thielmann is a practising architect and teacher based in London.
