danomyte...as per our conversation saturday..
"danteum"
giuseppe terragni
rome 1938
arguably the greatest unexecuted Fascist-era work of architecture was Terragni's Danteum, the Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.
There has been a misunderstanding with regard to the temporal dimension of architecture. It is commonly claimed that temporality does not exist within architecture (the way it supposedly exists within; and thus make possible; literary narrative), that buildings are "frozen in time", that temporality exists only in the experience of a building through time. Given these claims it is not surprising to find the current interest in "processional" buildings and building complexes that appear to be the only architecture to develop a linear "narrative" with a "proper" beginning, middle, and end (Guiseppi Terragni's Danteum project, the Villa Lante, and the Sacra Monti are frequently cited examples). My previous comments regarding narrative extend to procession in architecture: that is, on the one hand, all so-called processional architecture operates in much more complex and indeterminate ways than is generally assumed, and on the other hand, all architecture is processional (in other words, can not be non-processional).
