The immense Gothic church illustrated in incredible detail in ink—titled in blackletter script “The Kathredal”—represents not a place but a person. As the meticulous text at the bottom notes, it is “MOTHER SYMBOLICALLY REPRESENTED . . . A Picture of My Beautiful, Beautiful Mother.” Achilles G. Rizzoli’s architectural drawings depicted the people in his life as buildings in both exterior views and floor plans. Friends, neighbors, and family members—most frequently his mother—are personified in a range of styles in these blueprint-like pieces. In one, a whole family is portrayed as different components of a tiered Beaux-Arts palazzo: the mother as its foundation, the father as its central tower, the son as its columned entryway, and the daughters extending as wings on either side. A girl in his neighborhood is a boisterous group of towers playfully titled “Shirley’s Temple”; the postman is transformed into an imposing colonnaded structure with Gothic windows. Rizzoli filled almost every inch of the paper with architectural ornaments, poetic lines, and annotations in colored and black ink. Many of these temples, towers, civic buildings, and palaces were envisioned as part of an imagined utopia he called Y.T.T.E. (Yield to Total Elation), of which he was the “earthly architectural assistant and transcriber.”
A lifelong Californian, Rizzoli was born in 1896 in Marin County. It is likely that growing up amidst the building boom in San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake, characterized by Gothic and Beaux-Arts styles, and the imaginative architecture of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in the city, informed his work. After studying drafting and design, he worked for forty years as a draftsman in San Francisco architectural offices. Starting in the 1930s, he brought that same attention to detail and form to his personal work on Y.T.T.E. For many years, he hosted an “Achilles Tectonic Exhibit” in his home, where locals and friends were invited to view his creations. He also wrote short stories and novellas, although none was accepted by publishers.
Rizzoli died in 1981 following a major stroke. A family member saved his work from being discarded, and it was rediscovered in the 1990s by gallery owner Bonnie Grossman. The San Diego Museum of Art organized a solo show in 1997, followed by a 1998 exhibition of his drawings at the American Folk Art Museum that traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
