The Complex City: Venice and the Renaissance Forty Years Later

Gregotti Lectures
Donatella Calabi

Introduction Maura Manzelle Università Iuav di Venezia

There was a period, between the 1980s and 1990s, during when Venice served as a veritable “laboratory” for Iuav's reflections on the relationships between architecture and the city. Revisiting some of the episodes of urban transformation examined at that time may prove useful today in order to move “beyond the gaze,” raising questions that are at once historical and project oriented. Urban space was analysed as the stage upon which architectural works were set, within a context in which local tradition—the legacy of the past—played a significant role.

More than any other historical period, the Renaissance was understood as an age marked by tensions between an “international” architectural language and local urban morphology. In Venice, these tensions appeared particularly sharp, powerful, and consequential. They concerned not only forms, but also power, materials, and technical knowledge. At stake, in short, was the relationships between architecture and environment—an environment conceived, in Vittorio Gregotti’s words, as “the physical mode of being of the history that has constructed it”: artificial and fragile.

At the same time, there was a growing interest in the ways of “making history,” grounded in the back-and-forth movement of research itself: a labyrinthine succession of hypotheses, textual dissections, and interpretative choices.

The lecture will focus on three case studies: Piazza San Marco, the Rialto area, and a few sites associated with foreign communities. In these places, the ambitions and authority of architects seeking to renew and shape key urban spaces either came into conflict with—or, conversely, succeeded in acknowledging (with humility?)—the complexity of the contexts in which they were called upon to operate.

At the end of the conference, there will be an awards ceremony for the Vittorio and Marina Gregotti Master’s Degree Prize, organised by the Iuav University Foundation.

Image
Antonio Canaletto, Capriccio con edifici palladiani, 1750-1760
© Galleria Nazionale. Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta, Parma