EKPHRASIS: ARCHITECTURAL MARVELS IN SUSANNA CLARKE'S 'PIRANESI'
Intersecting Imaginaries

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

Piranesi, Susanna Clarke

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To find a dialog between the literary world and architecture, I made this investigation based on the recent book called Piranessi written by Susanne Clarke. She declares that the world's creation is described in the book Established on Imaginary Prisons: Giovanni Battista Piranesi Prints. This investigation focused on comparing the etching with the world description in the book and checking the differences and similarities between them. The methodology was to find different perspective drawings of the Piranesi book and compare them into paragraphs. Firstly, there are 123 pages where the house's architecture is mentioned in the book. Furthermore, they are after organize them into a north-south west-west template and then compare it with Piranesi drawings. In conclusion, She's based in the atmosphere of the imaginary prisons, reflecting the feeling of wetness and mess, but there is much difference. The most important is that there are just three levels in the book. Moreover, in Piranesi's etching, there is a fourth. There are no statues, and it seems that some of the statues found in the book were extracted from Via Appia and other etchings as Francesco Piranesi. Since she references Jorge Luis Borges' books and was inspired by MC Escher's drawings, she was also talking about that kind of infrastructure.