The Venice Variations: Preview Part 1

1. Why Venice matters today

There is a pair of linked questions at the heart of this book:

Why has Venice inspired, and continues to inspire, the imagination of so many artists, architects and ordinary people?

Does Venice still matter today? More specifically, what matters most the individual creative output of buildings, architecture and works of art, or the collective output of the city? 

For some, Venice might seem a residual legacy of past greatness, or a city of looming environmental threats whose inhabitants are in constant defence against mass tourist invasion.

But it is not only the questionable future of Venice that concerns us, but also the timeless contribution it makes to architecture and cities, two of the leading expressions of culture in modern society.

If, as humans, we are wired to instinctively seek out ideal places and patterns through architecture, literature, art, science, technology and mythology, Venice is one of those artefacts, which even when we remain in relative ignorance about how they evolved and where they come from, provide us with models and constructs, paradigms of experience revitalizing the imagination.

Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital, the book explores Venice as a prototypical city that holds unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia, dramatizing the reality of these questions:

What led to the bubbling vitality of a self-made city at sea, with its resurgent energies for 1000 years, with its works of architecture and art, its explorers, conquerors, founders, immigrants and ordinary people? 

Gentile Bellini. Procession in Piazza San Marco (1496), image sourced from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gentile_Bellini_Procession_in_St._Mark%27s_Square_(Galleria_dell%27Accademia,_Venice)

Published by Con-Figurations

Based on long-term research on architectural and urban configurations, this blog is about cities and architecture seen as con-figurations. Con-figuration means the relative disposition of parts or elements of a thing in a particular form, figure or combination. As a composite term, con-figuration expresses both the figure and the relations between things coming together to form the figure. It joins (and separates) the rules of arrangement and the arrangement itself, concept and vision, generation and analysis, form and meaning through a single notch, hinge, slash, score, cut or comma. Figuration is relevant to architecture and the city in many ways, from the conceptual messages they stand for to the illustration of designs through models, drawings and story boards. One aspect of figuration refers to what artefacts speak of, and is relevant to representation. It concerns the semantic function of buildings, cities and places and the contribution they make to the expression of social, political or philosophical messages. Yet, architecture and spatial arrangements also speak with through the ordering of space and spatial relationships (con-figuration). In certain cases the ways in which they speak with invites the generation of new meanings, training our imagination. The Con-figurations blog records research and criticism on architecture, buildings, cities, in built, drawn or analytical form (through digital and analogue data) including their associated descriptions (verbal or visual). It starts from the premise that architecture and cities consist of built and unbuilt artefacts, outcomes of individual creativity and collective social outcomes, spaces, forms, drawings, concepts, ideas and language including the people and social groups that are involved in their production. In addition to this blog I am the author of of two books, Architecture and Narrative by Routledge (2009) (https://www.routledge.com/Architecture-and-Narrative-The-Formation-of-Space-and-Cultural-Meaning/Psarra/p/book/9780415343763) and The Venice Variations by UCL Press (2018) (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/the-venice-variations); and editor of a third book Architecture and its Production Sites (forthcoming, Routledge).

The Venice Variations, Uncategorized

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