Having just read a long dissertation about the difficulties of creating a new archive or museum for diaries, I began imagining other kinds of impossible buildings, inspired by the designer Azusa Murakami’s architectural drawings, such as a bath house with bathtubs installed on the outside of the building (shown here), or an embroidery factory in Portugal made entirely from threads. De Quincey writes about the dream-like spiraling architecture of Piranesi in his Confessions of an Opium Eater, which he compares to his own opium reveries, also described by Coleridge in his experimental and surreal diaries. At the moment libraries are closing down all over the country due to lack of funding and innovation. As they disappear one by one, there is a double life of reinvention for these spaces waiting to happen.
In the early stage of my malady, the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural: and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) represented vast Gothic halls…Creeping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher on which again Piranesi is perceived…Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld…and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.--With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams.
Confessions of an English Opium Eater, De Quincey 1821
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