The architecture that does not exist: When painting invents impossible worlds
Imagine for a moment that you are standing at the center of a deserted square, paved with white marble veined in gray. Around you, palaces with Corinthian columns rise with geometric precision, their shadows stretching like fingers across the ground. Yet something is off. The buildings seem at once too large and too small, as if space itself were bending to some unknown logic. The arcades repeat into infinity, but no door opens. No passerby crosses this perfect city. You are in The Ideal City by Piero della Francesca, painted around 1470—a place that never existed, and yet haunts the history of art like a waking dream.
By Artedusa
••7 min readThis canvas, barely larger than a tabletop, is far more than a simple architectural representation. It is an enigma. A utopia. A demonstration of power, where perspective becomes a weapon, where space bends to the desires of those who command it. Since the Renaissance, painters have never ceased inventing impossible architectures—ghost towns, inescapable prisons, staircases that lead nowhere. These imaginary perspectives are not mere technical exercises. They reveal the aspirations, fears, and obsessions of an era. And today, as architects design virtual skyscrapers and artists generate digital landscapes, this tradition persists, more alive than ever.
But how did we get here? Why do these painted spaces, which defy the laws of physics, continue to fascinate us? And above all, what do they say about us?
01Perspective, or the art of mastering space
It all begins in Florence, one morning in 1415. Filippo Brunelleschi, goldsmith and architect, stands before the Baptistery of San Giovanni, an octagonal edifice of white and green marble. In his hands, a small wooden panel, a mirror, and a hole drilled through its center. He invites a friend to peer through the hole while holding the mirror on the other side. What the observer sees leaves him speechless: the painting, viewed through the device, aligns perfectly with the real building. For the first time, linear perspective is born.
This is not just an anecdote. It is a revolution. With this demonstration, Brunelleschi does not merely invent a technique—he changes how humanity perceives space. Before him, medieval painters represented the world symbolically, hierarchically. Important figures were larger, settings schematic. With perspective, everything changes. Space becomes measurable, controllable. It obeys mathematical rules, like the universe itself.
Leon Battista Alberti, in his treatise De Pictura (1435), codifies this discovery. For him, perspective is not just a tool—it is a philosophy. "The painting is a window through which one looks at history," he writes. But this window is also a trap. For in mastering space, Renaissance painters do not merely represent it—they create it. And what they create is not always realistic. Sometimes, it is an ideal. Sometimes, an illusion. Sometimes, a nightmare.
Take The Ideal City. This painting, attributed to Piero della Francesca or one of his students, depicts a perfectly symmetrical square, lined with Renaissance palaces. Everything is order, harmony, proportion. Yet there is a disturbing detail: the city is empty. No horse, no merchant, not even a stray dog. Some historians see in it an allegory of divine justice, others a study for an urban project never realized. But one thing is certain: this city never existed. It is the fruit of a dream—that of a Renaissance where man, through reason, could build anything, control everything.
02Piranesi, or architecture as nightmare
If the Renaissance invented perspective, the eighteenth century subverted it. And no one did so with as much genius as Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
Imagine vast prisons, their vaults so high they vanish into darkness. Spiral staircases that ascend and descend without ever intersecting. Pulleys, chains, walkways suspended over the void. Welcome to Carceri d’Invenzione (1745–1761), a series of etchings where Piranesi unleashes his unbridled imagination.
Unlike the ideal cities of the Renaissance, Piranesi’s prisons are not places of perfection. They are labyrinths without exit, spaces where reason turns against itself. "I believe I see the monuments of another planet," wrote a contemporary. And with good reason: these architectures defy all logic. Scales are exaggerated, perspectives distorted. At times, the buildings seem to collapse under their own weight.
Why did Piranesi create these nightmares? Theories abound. Some see in them a critique of the Enlightenment, an era where triumphant reason could become oppression. Others believe he drew inspiration from his own imprisonment in Venice in 1740, for debt. But one thing is certain: these etchings left their mark on history. They inspired the Romantics, the Surrealists, and even architects. The prisons of the nineteenth century, like Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, owe much to Piranesi. And today, his Carceri still haunt our imagination—from Tim Burton’s films to video games like Dark Souls.
03De Chirico and the melancholy of empty squares
If Piranesi invented nightmarish architecture, Giorgio de Chirico turned it into a theater of the absurd.
We are in 1914, in Ferrara, Italy. De Chirico, then twenty-six years old, paints The Melancholy of Departure. In the foreground, a deserted square, paved with gray stones. Classical arcades, a faceless statue, an abandoned glove. In the distance, a train pulls away. The atmosphere is strange, almost dreamlike. As if time had stopped.
This painting marks the birth of Pittura Metafisica, a movement that would deeply influence Surrealism. But what makes these architectures so unsettling? It is not just their emptiness. It is their silence. De Chirico does not paint real places, but mental spaces, where every object seems charged with hidden meaning. "Painting must discover the mystery concealed in the most ordinary things," he writes.
His empty squares, deserted stations, solitary towers have become icons. They inspired Dalí, Magritte, and even filmmakers—think of the sets in Blade Runner or the deserted streets of Twin Peaks. But behind this poetry of the strange lies a deeper question: what if architecture were only an illusion? What if the cities we build were merely stage sets, ready to collapse the moment we look away?
04Escher, or the art of walking on walls
In the twentieth century, a Dutch artist would push the logic of imaginary perspectives to its extreme: M.C. Escher.
Consider Relativity (1953), a lithograph where three worlds coexist in the same space. In one, figures walk on a horizontal floor. In another, they climb spiral staircases. In the third, they move along the walls, as if gravity had changed direction. Everything is perfectly coherent—and yet, impossible.
Escher did not invent these illusions by chance. He drew inspiration from mathematics, geometric tiling, and even the work of the mathematician Roger Penrose, who theorized "impossible objects." But what fascinates in Escher is not just the technical prowess. It is the way he turns architecture into a game of the mind.
His works have influenced generations of artists and designers. Postmodern architects like Rem Koolhaas drew from them to create buildings that defy the laws of physics. Video games like Monument Valley made them a visual language. And even today, his staircases that ascend and descend at the same time continue to haunt us—as if our own perception of space were nothing but an illusion.
05Painted architecture, mirror of our obsessions
Why do these imaginary architectures continue to fascinate us? Perhaps because they reveal something profound about our relationship with the world.
In the Renaissance, ideal cities reflected a faith in man and reason. In the eighteenth century, Piranesi’s prisons expressed the anxieties of an era where progress could turn into oppression. In the twentieth century, the spaces of de Chirico and Escher captured the absurdity of modern life.
Today, as architects design sustainable cities and artists explore the possibilities of virtual reality, this tradition endures. Tomas Saraceno’s Cloud Cities, suspended in the air, or Refik Anadol’s AI-generated digital landscapes, are the direct heirs of these imaginary perspectives.
But at its core, this architecture that does not exist asks a simple question: what if the world we build is only a projection of our desires? What if, behind every building, every city, every street, there lies another reality—stranger, more poetic, more terrifying?
Perhaps that is why we continue to paint them. To remind ourselves that space is not just a matter of bricks and mortar. But also of dreams. And nightmares.