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 →
The cognitive art of rendering displays of complex data – design strategies in the Piazza San Marco
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 →
Mapping Real and Representational Space – Part I
‘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 →
A Monumental Piece of Mythmaking: Jacopo de’ Barbari aerial view of Venice -Part III
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 →
The Venice Variations: Introduction Preview
Between authored architecture and the non-authored city "To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice." -Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Three artefacts In 1972 the Italian writer Italo Calvino published his most acclaimed work of fiction, a novel about cities that made a seminal... Continue Reading →