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Commedia dell’Architettura

Project Date: 2015
Award: Syracuse Architecture Thesis Exhibition

Commedia dell’arte is a form of street theatre in which an exaggerated cast of society’s archetypes play out situational tropes. The result is an accessible art form and a sly commentary on social issues. The façade can transform an anonymous structure into a character with values. Baroque palaces were clad with ornament to express playful grandeur, while Corbusien homes were bare and sympathized with the machine.

Applying the commedia lens to architecture, we can see and design architecture as a series of motives, actions, and reactions among buildings in order to enhance the legibility of their identity and tell a story.




Making faces.  Creating a caricature takes an existing, familiar framework, and exaggerating select features to absurd proportions. These exaggerations can be done through four types of transformation; scaling - making something larger or smaller; reorienting - rotating a feature to face a new direction; repeating - copying a unique feature; or literalizing - taking a figurative gesture and making it literal.


Putting on a show.  The Syracuse University campus was conceived with Beaux Arts intentions, but as it developed, the ideals were lost among insensitive spatial interventions. Axes were cut, symmetries unbalanced, and scales disrespected. The campus became a jumbled collection relationship-breaking buildings - a series of sins.

But because of these sins, the campus became a dynamic, exciting, inflected whole full of juxtaposition and tension.

Rather than removing the guilty, the Divine Comedy narrative is superimposed onto the campus, selectively exaggerating  facades in order to reinforce the unintentional spatial relationships into purposeful gestures.




©2022 Mark Zlotsky
mark.zlotsky@gmail.com