Borromini, the Casa dei Filippini and the Two-Way Relationship between Representation and Architectural Form

Abstract

The stratified relationship and mutual influence between the representation of the project and the form of built architecture manifest above all in the facade design by virtue of its natural rhetorical vocation. This is the case of the Casa dei Filippini, designed by Francesco Borromini in the second quarter of the 17th century in Rome. The perspective niche in its façade appears to be a literal three-dimensional transcription of a graphic convention adopted in the presentation drawings. To understand the context and the reasons for this “translation”, this article historically frames the theme of the facade intended as a mask and its implicit representational qualities, which can configure it as an autonomous work from the building itself; it frames the interferences between architecture and its image in the era of the advent of pseudo-projective representation and the resistance it finds; it focuses on the facade of the Casa dei Filippini and its perspective niche, here surveyed and photo-modeled to determine the size and relationship between the actual and the perceived shape. Through these methodological and operational premises, the article reconstructs the original center of the façade deformation and analyzes the fictitious value of the facade, as testified by Borromini’s attempt to orient its perception through the drawings of his Opus Architectonicum and those derived from them, eventually confirming the two-way relationship between form and representation.