Bringing together leading writers and practicing architects including Jean Dethier, David Mayernik, Massimo Scolari, Robert Adam, David Watkin and Leon Krier, this volume provides a kaleidoscopic, multilayered exploration of the Architectural Capriccio. It not only explains the phenomena within a historical context, but moreover, demonstrates its contemporary validity and appropriateness as a holistic design methodology, an inspiring pictorial strategy, an efficient rendering technique and an optimal didactic tool. The book shows and comments on a wide range of historic masterworks and highlights contemporary artists and architects excelling in a modern updated, refreshed and original tradition of the Capriccio.

Showing the range of Carl Laubin's work, this book follows the development of the architectural capriccio from the earlier incorporation of whimsical ideas in Laubin's paintings to the more elaborate architectural compositions based on the buildings of Wren, Hawksmoor, Cockerell and Ledoux.

Bernardo Bellotto is considered to be one of the greatest topographical and landscape painters of the eighteenth century. Trained as a painter of cityscapes, he produced vivid and memorable images of many of the greatest cities of Europe, including Venice, Florence, Rome, Dresden, Munich, Vienna, and Warsaw. He also ventured successfully into genre, portraiture, allegory, and history painting. This beautiful book, written by leading specialists on Bellotto, examines his career and artistic development, places his work in the context of the political needs of central European monarchs, and presents a selection of his major paintings from each of his principal periods and genres. Bellotto began as a painter of conventional views of Venice in the manner of his more famous uncle, Canaletto. However, his quest for new subject matter led him to visit half a dozen cities in northern and central Italy in the early 1740s, and at twenty-five he left Italy for northern Europe, where he spent the rest of his life working for royal and aristocratic patrons. In Dresden he was engaged in the service of Augustus III, where he created many glorious canvases and was awarded the title of Court Painter. He then moved to Vienna and recorded its attractions for Empress Maria Theresa. He ended his career as Court Painter in Warsaw, and his detailed paintings of the city played an important role in its reconstruction after the Second World War. The book demonstrates that in each of the places Bellotto lived, he was able to capture the particular light and life with sensitivity and imagination.

From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.

For Italian city builders more than a thousand years ago, the urban realm was the great theater where their best aspirations were played out, the place where society said the most substantial things about who they were and what they longed for. In this masterful blend of art and cultural history, architect David Mayernik reveals how the very different cities of Venice, Rome, Florence, Siena, and Pienza were all literally designed to be both models of the mind and images of heaven. Mayernik takes the reader on a journey into the past in Timeless Cities, but he also explains why these city-building ideas remain relevant today. For those travelling on vacation or appreciating the art and architecture of Italy from home, Mayernik helps bring the wonder and beauty of the Renaissance mind a little closer.