Piranesi Prison Expansion
Undergraduate Studio, McGill University
Montreal, QC, Canada
Winter 2019
Instructors: David Covo, Vedanta Balbahadur
The goal of this two-week design studio was to expand an 11" by 17" facsimile of one of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's 1761 Carceri etchings into a larger, 24" by 36" sheet.
The panel I chose, C14 Ill, contains a so-called "impossible geometry" (outlined by the rectangle to the lower left) in which the left-most and right-most staircases and the arches above them appear to be in different planes, despite being connected.
I chose to flip gravity by 90 degrees, projecting an aerial view of the etching onto the paper, which allowed me to reveal the aforementioned geometries to be separate from one another, showing how the impossibility of it may simply be an illusion.
The rotated plane is drawn using the same perspective grid as Piranesi's original work, and this method also allowed me to creatively expand his work behind as well.
