Coffee, music and the deep shade of Italian piazzas twist into one in a sunny corner of my brain. They are thrown together by mixed up memories and the pleasure of hard Cs and long Os - mercato, staccato, Livorno, cappuccino. Capriccio belongs there too. In art we see capricci from masters of architectural fragments, Gandy or Piranesi throwing together walls and arches, draping vegetal fronds across and crumbling stones with a certain whimsy. I came across capriccio in praise for the work of Rob Krier -sometimes labelled as a postmodernist or new urbanist but most easily recognised as an adherent of classicism. He does indeed collage places together in his drawings to show how a square or street might work with a different type of enclosure, with an open facade or a stepped back wall. But capriccio is equally applied to the monumental classical orders punctuated with posing torsos that he sculpted for a Bilbao building in 2011.
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