Since 2014, CARTHA has provided a platform for critical thinking on architecture and society. Founded by an international team of architects and designers, it aims to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical approaches to contemporary architecture. Each year, CARTHA initiates research and the publication of a set of issues on a topic in its online magazine that is then brought together in an annual book.
Almost three centuries ago, in 1721, the Austrian architect Fischer von Erlach published A Plan of Civil and Historical Architecture. This book, a supposed comparative analysis of the world’s architecture, contains a number of plates depicting a group of monuments such as the Giza Pyramids, and the buildings of still remote cultures like Chinese pavilions and landscapes alongside projects and buildings by Fischer von Erlach himself. On each plate, below the image, a bilingual caption shortly exposes von Erlach’s personal views on the represented buildings and projects.
By presenting both existing buildings, regardless of how accurate their representations are, and de facto fictional buildings in the same manner, Fischer consciously manipulated the notions of reality of the European population. As he wrote, his intention was “to please the eye of the amateur by some examples of different ways of building and to inspire artists to inventions rather than to inform the erudite”. Regardless of the reasons behind it, the fact remains that the ill-informed reality of a well-positioned individual came to shape the notions of a whole continent.
