“Painting in Space”. Henri Ciriani and the Metaverse

A Peruvian-born architect and teacher, Henri Ciriani has been spending most of his lifetime in developing a specific form of modernism in a sort of abstract, sculptural architecture suspended between land art and painting. His production of colorful sketches, refined designs and engaging buildings illustrate the trajectory of this long, “patient” research on “painting” shapes in space. His architecture’s goal is to inspire human highest ambitions, for example, by apparently challenging nature or defying gravity. Ciriani learnt how to use concrete to shape atectonic planes to form buildings that look like a three-dimensional drawing in motion rather than actual, weighty buildings. Rooted in the Radical architecture, a specific corpus of his designs illustrate a visionary idea of vertical cities dispersed in the landscape that escape the earthly physical limits. These huge towers are made of a combination of large plates containing duplex and triplex dwellings, three-orthogonal concrete frameworks zigzagging through space, informal volumes for collective functions and platforms where small figures meet and stare at the horizon. Colors contribute to make these towers look like huge inhabited abstract sculptures that incubate the artistic projections of modern and contemporary artists to produce a new sintesi delle arti. At the light of the metaverso and the increasing importance of virtual architecture in the digital infrastructures, the representational quality of Ciriani’s towers acquires a novel meaning, which is here investigated in the perspective of putting the huge intangible heritage of projects preserved in the architectural archives at the service of the metaverso.