Anticipating Antiquity: Jean Jacques Boissard's 'Topographia Urbis Romae' (1681) and the Reworking of Rome

By:
Ir Willem de Bruijn
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Jean Jacques Boissard’s 'Topographia urbis Romae' describes and records the remains of Ancient Rome at the end of the sixteenth century, allowing contemporary readers to produce and cultivate a complex image of the Roman city. It is clear that the temporal index ‘ancient’ involves a conception of Antiquity that merely anticipates, from the fifteenth century onwards, a distinctly modern world coming into being and under construction in the architectural space of books. I will argue that Boissard’s 'Topographia' does more than just record and represent (Ancient) Rome and that the volumes produce a space, in which a new way of taking an interest in the city could be articulated and materialised. 'Topographia' realises a Transalpine fantasy that reworks the past in order to reconfigure as well as transfigure the city in the space of the book. I will extend Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘material re-inscription’ to theorise the book as not only re-writing but also re-building the landscape of Rome as a Rome-scape. As such, it preserves the idea of a city (Rome) continuously reinventing and duplicating itself in other spaces, of which the book is one.


Keywords: Architecture, Rome, Scape
Stream: Books, Writing and Reading
Presentation Type: 30 minute Paper Presentation in English
Paper: Anticipating Antiquity

Ir Willem de Bruijn

PhD Student, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
London, UNITED KINGDOM

Willem de Bruijn (born 1975) studied architecture at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands and shortly also at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden. He is now working on his doctoral thesis at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, where he has also taught and co-organised a Ph.D. research conference in November 2005. Central to his work is the concept of the book as an architectural space.

Ref: B06P0146