Contemporary architects and artists have found an unlikely form of inspiration: the Baroque. The sophistication of today's digital modeling and fabrication capabilities has enabled a significant increase in formal complexity—a hallmark of the Baroque style. Architectural historian Mario Carpo describes this approach as representing the "second digital turn"—embracing big data and its immeasurable intricacy. A prime example is “Digital Grotesque II,” an elaborate 3D-printed grotto installed at the Centre Pompidou by Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger. Other architects and designers, such as Mark Foster Gage, Neri Oxman, and Alisa Andrasek, are pursuing an “unprecedented level of formal exuberance.”
From the start of the 17th century, architects began to embrace a newly formed Baroque style, aiming to overwhelm viewers’ senses and impart an elevated, otherworldly sense of grandeur. Although the Late Baroque period ended in the mid-18th century, this highly embellished approach has recently found an audience among artists and designers seeking to exploit the powerful capabilities of today's computational and display technologies. For instance, the 2022 “Digital Baroque: History Meets Algorithm” exhibit aimed to provide "a Baroque lens on new digital technologies" via physical and NFT artworks designed by eleven artists and three collectives.
Although ornamentation is the most apparent Baroque feature, there is much more to the style than embellishment. The Baroque period's explorations of movement, light, and connections to nature are equally significant contributions to architecture and art. Toyo Ito's design for the Museo Internacional del Barroco in Puebla, Mexico, a premier institution for the global study of Baroque works, gives preference to these qualities.
As a prominent representative of Japanese architecture's "white school"—characterized by lightness, ephemerality, and the minimization of embellishment—Ito is not an architect one would typically associate with the Baroque style. Yet, his design of the Puebla museum reveals sophisticated strategies to embody fundamental Baroque sensibilities without relying on ornamentation. By emphasizing movement, daylight, and natural connections, Ito provides a conducive setting that resonates with the displayed artworks without overpowering them.
Motion in the Baroque style is implied by fluidity, continuity, and unpredictability. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued: "The Baroque... endlessly produces folds... the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other." The Museo Internacional del Barroco comprises an array of interconnected gallery spaces whose geometries fold into each other. Ito took a rigid five-by-five grid of galleries in the plan and rotated these spaces in a graduated fashion. As a result, one corner of the grid remained unchanged, while the opposite corner exhibited the most significant degree of rotation. Ito pulled the dividing walls apart at the points of intersection and warped them to allow for seamless movement between galleries. The result is both comprehensible and disorienting: a simple spatial organization whose deformation delivers a fluid experience.
Chiaroscuro is a technique Baroque artists employed to increase visual drama via illumination and shadow. According to artist Rosie Lesso, the term refers "to the dramatic, theatrical modeling of light and dark," as seen in paintings by Caravaggio and Rembrandt van Rijn. In the Puebla museum, the interstitial voids created by peeling the gallery walls away from the rooms' corners are strategic opportunities to bring daylight into the building. Skylight sizes vary with the amount of space provided—a function of the walls' varying geometries and rotation. Ito's daylight strategy achieves a more extreme spectrum of illumination and visual contrast than in most contemporary museums, where lighting homogeneity is the goal.
This sharp contrast, which occurs only in the in-between spaces and public circulation zones, increases the dynamic range of the visual field in the spirit of Baroque art.
The Baroque period was a time of shifting attitudes regarding humanity's relationship to the natural world. The geometric formal gardens at Villa d'Este or Versailles signified total human dominion over the landscape. Later in the mid-18th century, the English style represented a more informal, less heavy-handed approach to garden design. Each strategy evoked a different kind of natural grandeur in the spirit of the Baroque movement. Similarly, Ito's museum exhibits two general approaches to landscape design: the containment of foliage and pools in crisply defined geometries—and the informal, undulating terrain at the site's perimeter. Both strategies demonstrate different relationships between architecture and landscape—and varying approaches humans apply to natural systems as ways to connect with the natural environment.
Compared to the intricate works of the second digital turn, the Museo Internacional del Barroco seems formally simple. Yet this initial reading belies an underlying sophistication. Reflecting upon elaborate creations such as the Digital Grotesque, Carpo writes: "The disquieting or even hostile aesthetic of these creations transcends our ability to apprehend and comprehend them..." In contrast, Ito's museum in Puebla indicates more nuanced ways of celebrating the awe-inducing qualities of the Baroque period, enabling visitors to learn about this significant movement's aims not by overwhelming them—but by inviting them to engage in a process of discovery.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more:The latest from columnist Blaine Brownell, FAIA, includes a review on the rise of phygital spaces | the potential of STFE | an interview with Pritzker prize-winning architect Riken Yamamoto, a review of 3D-Printed Nanocellulose Materials, a roundup on sustainable manufacturers in Egypt, a review of the Grand Egyptian Museum, a look into Cairo's informal settlements, a profile on textile designer and weaver Suzanne Tick, and he also looks at emerging carbon capture and storage technologies, and the blue economy.
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