Tracey Eve Winton is an architect, artist, urbanist, and associate professor at the University of Waterloo (Canada). She received her PhD in the history and philosophy of architecture from Magdalene College, Cambridge, and her MArch in the History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University. In 2014, the ACSA gave her a Creative Achievement Award for her original theatre works, and in 2018 she received the NCBDS Faculty Award for teaching excellence. She currently holds a SSHRC Research Creation grant and is working on her project Dwellings & Journeys. Her research interests include the symbolism of thresholds and gateways, the history and iconography of the museum, ruins, architectural spoils, and adaptive reuse, and self-built housing. She has been an editor of The Fifth Column, Alphabet City, and the Journal of Research and Application in Architecture and Urbanism and is editing a translation of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) and a critical commentary. Her upcoming publications include an architectural reading of the famous Renaissance library in the ducal palace at Urbino, and an essay on Peter Greenaway’s film, The Belly of an Architect, in relation to the architecture of Rome. Ongoing research investigates the language of modern architecture in the work of Carlo Scarpa and the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona.
Giorgio De Chirico’s Metaphysical City: Mystical Matters of Time and Space
From 1911 to 1919, Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (d. 1978) created his early “metaphysical” paintings. In these works, many of which portray urban scenes and strongly thematize architecture, the surrealists, Magritte, and others recognized a modern sense of time, space, and matter. Their “now” feels densified, sedimented by temporal experience, a present extended deep into the mythic past, toward prehistory. His spatial sense similarly juxtaposes distant elements (Greek alongside Roman and Etruscan) with local, familiar, small-scale objects like biscuits and fruits. Objects break out in clusters, creating an axis from the medieval construal of place and space to the attracted masses that give rise to space-time in Einstein’s relativity theory. Coupled with a sense of time as imminent, he constructs unusual “perspectives” to convey spatial complexity and incorporate duration, as though the viewer were walking around inside the painting. De Chirico focuses on spatial relationships and enclosure, horizons and framing devices, as well as archaic apparatuses for determining boundaries: connecting and separating the visible and the invisible. Paintings open within paintings, vast spaces invade smaller spaces, landscapes blossom inside rooms. The urban settings invoke aspects of theatre, creating tensions linked to scale and representation. Architecture is central to De Chirico’s work; it enfolds a theatrical space of appearance, the theatre of memory in which reframed elements decompose and recompose. Many of his objects (set squares, windows, frames, drawing boards) concern drawing as a ritualized, cosmogonic act. Art as artifice transcends realism, formulating human perception as constructed from memory fragments, historical, contextual, and metaphorically perspectival.