Geoarchitectural Histories: A Terrestrial Perspective on the Grotta Grande

The Grotta Grande, commissioned by Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, to architect Bernardo Buontalenti, is one of the grottoes erected in the Boboli Gardens in the 16th century. A building which presents a familiar Renaissance composition, with its temple-like façade and vaulted interiors, but which also creates an unusual geological expression with its cladding of raw calcareous concretions and stalactites harvested from the surroundings of the city. Since the 1960s, this grotto – one of the largest, most complex, and best preserved of the Mannerist period – has been investigated by art and architecture historians. Those research endeavours have generated substantial literature defining its chronology, its authors, and interpreting the cultural motives it contains, yet always neglecting the rocks of the Grotta Grande themselves, and the building’s manifestations of a fundamental geological anchorage at work in architecture.

“Geoarchitectural Histories: A Terrestrial Perspective on the Grotta Grande” focuses on telling the story of the grotto’s multiple levels of geological presences by means of writing and photography. It observes the cultural history of late 16^th century Florence’s inclination towards the geological in its architectural, aesthetical and scientific practices; the grotto’s constructive, material as well as extractive history; and the geological history and temporalities of the stones and stalactites of the Grotta Grande, in relation with the deep time of the Tuscan territory.

While accounting for the many geological layers embedded in this specific building, the project also investigates the possibility of a geocentric history for architecture at large, bridging the cultural and the environmental, incorporating timescales and processes specific to the geological realm, and recognizing a form of terrestrial authorship in the art of building. Thanks to disciplinary encounters between architectural historiography, the environmental humanities and the Earth sciences, “Geoarchitectural Histories” strives to describe some of the continuities and dependences at work in architecture, between the cultural realm of humans and the geological realm of the Earth.