The maverick genius of Baroque architecture, Bernini’s lifelong rival
The most inventive and most rebellious genius of Italian Baroque architecture, Bernini’s lifelong rival. Unlike Bernini’s splendid extroversion, he was obsessed with using complex geometry to make the walls and plans of a building undulate, twist, and flow. His Church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane is tiny in size, yet has a wave-like undulating facade and a dizzying oval dome — all but single-handedly he pushed architecture from static proportion toward a dynamic, sculptural spatial experiment. Solitary and frustrated in temperament, he ended by suicide. Overshadowed by Bernini in life, he was after death revered by modern architects as a prophet who dared to break every rule.
Before Borromini, the walls of a building were mostly straight and flat. He made walls undulate in and out like waves, continuous and rolling, so the whole space seemed to flow, to breathe. On tiny plots he built dizzying, complex geometry. His contemporaries thought him a heretic, yet three hundred years later, when the Zaha Hadids made architecture twist and flow again, people remembered: Borromini had done just this, back in the Baroque.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.