Project

In 1499 Aldus printed the most ambitious book of the Italian Renaissance: the 'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili' by Francesco Colonna. In an invented idiom, blending Latin, Greek and Italian, and through over 160 xylographs the HP recounts its protagonist's amorous errors while he seeks his beloved within a dream landscape of antique myths and monuments - whose every detail is described and thoroughly analysed. Since everything beheld dwarfs its ancient models and contemporary counterparts, the HP becomes an illustrated textbook on how to realize an 'artificial space' which impresses its 'visitors' (readers) to the degree that henceforth their own surroundings (the best from literature) will seem inferior. Thus Umberto Eco's general definition of 'hyperreality' applies to the HP. Yet whilst the most elaborate of Eco's hyperrealities, theme parks, employ as well several sensualistic means, Colonna's 'meta-hyperreality' draughts an inhabited world, whose every object is in its making genuine and exemplary. Therefore the theses developed by Bianca Bosker in her recent study on 'simulacrascapes' in today's China (residential areas mimicking both the architectural and extra-architectural particularities of their Western prototypes) provide a more promising reference. By varying and exhausting these upon Colonna's treatise-novel a socio-architectural taxonomy and theory of 'hyperreal mimesis' shall be outlined.

• Dr. Thomas Reiser

  Technische Universität München
  Fakultät für Architektur
  Lehrstuhl für Restaurierung
  München