Optimism and aporia

The drawing as the locus solus of Newton's and 'Cannaregio' cenotaphs

Abstract

This paper proposes to trace relations between the projects of Newton's Cenotaph (1784), by Étienne-Louis Boullée, and Cannaregio Town Square (1978), by Peter Eisenman, through the drawing as the place of realizing these architectures. To do so, we start mainly from clashes and divergences rather than similarities and convergences. In addition to drawing as an interface to this other dimension that is offered to us by the architects, we also use the treatment of both projects as funerary architectures, as we interpret this work by Eisenman as a cenotaph itself, one of the few approximations that we make between the two projects. Therefore, we deal with a presentation of the architects, followed by the analyzes of the referred works, in order to then outline our considerations about the characteristics that bring them together and, above all, distance them. We seek, here, to tension the clear historiographical thread of architecture that connects the various points dispersed by almost antagonistic forces, but which have the drawing as this network by which the projects become a place of time suspended between the past, the present and the future; the locus solus that configures itself around its own reality and allows the creation these architectures.