Stairway to the stars, we got better things to do

Contrary to one theory, the Internet is not made of cats. Not exclusively, anyway. Another major component is photographs of Lego-block re-creations of Escher's 'Relativity', which together occupy not just bandwidth but an entire symphony-orchestrawidth.


So you would think that someone would also have rendered Piranesi's Carceri in the plastic-block medium, but No. In fact when I mentioned the idea to John Coulthart at feuilleton, it went down like the proverbial cup of cold sick aboard a zeppelin Titanic:

I’ve grown rather tired of seeing all of popular culture being filtered through the medium of the Lego brick. The reason you get Escher over Piranesi is that those meme things only work when enough people know what’s been converted into Lego. On the level of Escher (never mind any recent film or TV series) Piranesi isn’t at all popular.

We would call attention to the Carceri as a foreshadowing or harbinger of Escher, but it happens that even more authoritative sources than Riddled have already done so. Note the dubious geometry and depraved perspective. Reutersvärd Triangles are all very well in first-year Psych textbooks and on Swedish postage stamps, but they have NO PLACE IN ARCHITECTURE, and several physical laws must be suspended to prevent Carceri XIV from collapsing in a heap of gravity and contradictions.

Of course Coulthart has no sense of humour clings defiantly to an old-school analog aesthetic. Just as well that I didn't suggest using Legos to build Bruegel's Tower of Babel instead.