Brodsky & Utkin Hardcover – Big Book, 1 September 2015

Tanto los contenidos como la edición son excepcionalmente buenos. Muy recomendable para arquitectos, artistas plásticos o diseñadores

A present for my wife, a fine art printmaker RE. She was delighted with it, and will be asking the university to buy one library so her students can refer to it.

Un bel volume di ottima fattura, grande qualità grafica, magnifici contenuti, suggestivo e immancabile in una bella biblioteca di architetture oniriche e ispiranti.

First there was Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a novel about death and architecture written in the Renaissance, wherein distraught Poliphilus searches for his dead beloved among the ruins of Antiquity (the novel is splendidly illustrated and was printed in 1499 by Aldus Manitus), and there was another Italian, Gianbattista Piranesi, who in the late 18th century etched his strange portrayals of the ruins of old Rome to almost universal acclaim. After Colonna, Piranesi partook in the French Enlightenment's love for "paper architecture": projects that were drawn and detailed by famed architects of that time that did not get to be built either because they were extravagantly costly or imposible to build with the materials and building techniques then at hand. But, like Colonna's delight in drawing ruins, Piranesi's etchings of his "Carceri d'Invenzione" (Prisons of the Imagination, also available here at Amazon.com) went beyond of the extravagance of "paper architecture" to make a huge impact on European romantic imagination that doubtless fed the first "Gothic" novels and poems of writers like Anne Radcliffe and the Bronte sisters, and some darker people like Charles Maturin and Mathew Lewis and, eventually, Wilkie Collins. The "paper architecture" devised by contemporary Russian architects Brodsky and Utkin in many ways restate Piranesi's "paper [Roman] ruins". In their book, Brodsky and Utkin go back to imaginative architectural drawing to comment heavily on the political restrictions in mid-20th-century architecture of the Soviet Union and make etchings simulating 18th-century drawings and etchings that exaggerate the irrational State political demands on soviet architects, all of which is presented as delusional wanderings of extravagant architects of that time. A mixture of black architectural humor and political criticism, the plates of this book speak by themselves without a written statement by the authors. Of course, the titles and descriptions on each plate —which usually contain text etched on the plate itself— are as strange and evocative as the images, and are mostly quotations from famed Russian writers. A beautiful architectural nightmare not to be missed!

Me parece una publicación imprescindible si se tiene un interés particular en los 'arquitectos de papel' surgidos en la antigua URSS. En cuanto al producto en sí, si bien se podría echar en falta una mejor calidad del papel, creo que en un papel excesivamente brillante se perdería el detalle de los grabados. En ese sentido un papel opaco y áspero como el de este libro es más fiel al aspecto que tienen las obras al verlas en directo. Tiene varios prólogos intersantes, y los textos de los grabados vienen en la página contigua. Lo recomiendo.