Page Street and Vincent Street Housing (1928-1930), by Edwin Lutyens. Image credits: Steve Cadman, Wikipedia Commons As England embarks yet again on a major housing building programme in the first quarter of the 21st century under the New Towns Task Force , it is worthwhile reflecting on earlier architectural attempts to address previous acute housing... Continue Reading →
I will be speaking at the Architectural Space and Society Centre at Birkbeck 9 November 6pm Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, Birkbeck Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital: a genealogy of individual and collective intelligence in his architecture Sophia Psarra, Bartlett School of Architecture Leveraging new materials and means of production, architects, planners and corporate powers... Continue Reading →
Visibility Graph Analysis of the Piazza San Marco in the context of neighbouring islands using Depthmap software1 Blog Entry I ‘...and the whole place in its huge elegance, the grace of its conception and the beauty of its detail, was more than ever like a great drawing room, the drawing-room of Europe profane... Continue Reading →
‘However abstract, however contemplative in spirit, however remote from practical application, it [geometry] must surely have arisen from, and easily translates back into, the tasks of shaping artifacts, laying out buildings, and surveying land’. Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries. In a visually oriented culture we tend to equate... Continue Reading →
Looking closely at Jacopo de’ Barbari’s print, the earliest and largest naturalistic aerial view of the city that survives, we see that he used a geometric device, common to Mappae mundi. The vertical axis connecting the two mythological figures traverses the Orologio and runs between the two columns in the Piazzeta. While the columns guarded... Continue Reading →
Consisting of six large sheets, the famous 1500’s woodcut (Venetie MD) by JACOPO de’ Barbari was a monumental feat of printmaking (135 by 282 cm).1 It took three years to complete, composing a southwest view of the city projecting viewers to a height of 500 metres, a position previously unimaginable. Yet, the naturalistic detail of... Continue Reading →
In The Venice Variations (link to the pdf of the book) I discuss the properties of Venice’s urban form through which it came into being over a large period of time. These operations gave the city its physical form, social and economic life. Alongside these operations, a parallel project of mythmaking was taking place, by... Continue Reading →
Delighted to see #thevenicevariations in the bookshop of the @la_Biennale Thank you to the team of @UCLpress @BartlettArchUCL @bartlettSDAC
PART TWO Following from my previous blog, I explore here how architecture informs literature and how ideas can be transferred from literature to architecture. In my book Architecture and Narrative13 I looked at the short fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer who used architectural models in his work. One of the most intriguing... Continue Reading →
PART ONE This is the first part of a talk I recently gave in Figurations, a History and Theory conference at the Bartlett School of Architecture, organised by Jane Rendell, Sophie Read and Robin Wilson (25 April 2018). It is fortuitous that that the conference took place at the same time with the opening of... Continue Reading →
Con-figurations 