Piranesi: An Unsettling World of Architecture

The vastly overscaled elements, lineaments and sculptures of a seemingly infinite house form the backdrop of Susanna Clarke's 2020 novel Piranesi. Head of Teaching and Learning at the Architectural Association, Mark Morris draws on his research into architectural models, paracosms and the representation of buildings in fiction, filtering this through the lens of an encyclopaedic knowledge of architectural history to investigate the book's narrative arc, its ghostly visitations and its beautiful if not overbearing architectural mise en scène.