Teaching as an Architectural Project

Vittorio Gregotti’s Venetian Lectures

Tolentini, sala Scarpa Biblioteca
Fondo Vittorio Gregotti

Curated by Guido Morpurgo and Antonella D’Aulerio with Haydyn Jones and Enrico Miglietta

The original manuscripts of the lectures delivered by Vittorio Gregotti at the Università Iuav di Venezia stand as ‘self-contained texts’ of high conceptual and visual density, their structure arising from the interweaving of arguments, theoretical frameworks and cultural references.
The Venetian lectures are ‘images of thought’ that reveal the inner workings of their own compositional process, a project for the teaching of architecture that offers itself to future generations of students as a critical framework, generating a collective disciplinary culture.

Opening Thursday 21 May 2026, 10.30 am

Open until 29 May 2026, Monday to Friday, 10am–1pm.
In the afternoon by appointment only (please call +39 041 257 1104 or email infobiblioteca@iuav.it and biblioprestito@iuav.it).

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The manuscripts of the lectures delivered at Iuav by Professor Vittorio Gregotti over a period of more than twenty years constitute an important testimony to the way in which he transmitted architectural knowledge and experience through the critical approach that informed his unceasing research activity.

The “Venetian lectures” emerge, in particular, as a fundamental epistemological section within Gregotti’s theoretical corpus on architecture, constructed through the establishment of relationships with other artistic practices as well as with diverse fields of knowledge, ranging from philosophy to anthropology, from history to literature. The manuscripts presented in the exhibition appear as autonomous texts, distinguished by a high degree of theoretical and semantic density, developed through the complex interaction of arguments, conceptual mappings, and references to design culture.

Through these materials, Vittorio Gregotti developed theoretical propositions and experimented with pedagogical methods grounded in dialogue with Iuav students, regarded as primary interlocutors in the construction of knowledge based on critical exchange.

Especially significant are the 1998 lectures devoted to the disciplinary meaning of European architecture and to its essence, contested between identity and substitutability. This cycle of lectures constitutes the original nucleus of two central works in Gregotti’s theoretical production: the monographic issue of the journal Rassegna, entitled The European Archipelago (1998), and the volume L’identità dell’architettura europea e la sua crisi (Einaudi, 1999). The latter – among the most incisive contributions within Gregotti’s extensive theoretical oeuvre – anticipated themes and phenomena that remain at the centre of contemporary architectural and cultural debate.

The exhibition thus takes shape as an essay on a specific conception of teaching, understood as a privileged laboratory for experimentation and verification. From this perspective, the Gregotti Iuav Archive proposes itself as a space for critical reflection within which one of the exemplary processes through which disciplinary knowledge was produced within the university can be made visible. The manuscripts of the Venetian lectures are “images of thought” through which theory takes form and is transmitted to future generations of architects, contributing to the construction of a collective culture projected toward the future precisely insofar as it is capable of “considering the past as the principal interlocutor of the new.”