venice

Venice is rife with infrastructure and Venetians have about as many names for streets, plazas, and waterways as Eskimos have for snow. The variation is almost infinite, but the parameters seem exceptionally clear if one adheres to the typical tourist itinerary. Piazza San Marco is the best example. It essentializes Venice’s textural charm in spacious volume and monumental ornament. In many ways, the piazza is a singular infrastructural event--like the Arsenale, the train station, the Rialto, or the Grand Canal. However, unlike these other examples, Piazza San Marco organizes the city through emulation. Formally and organizationally, its components set the prototype by which the city’s political and social nodes develop.

The particularly Venetian concept of architectural emulation is visible within the piazza itself. In the plan of Piazza San Marco to the far left, the piazza proper opens to the cathedral’s face while the Palazzo Ducale courtyard (lower right on the plan) addresses the cathedral’s flank. The white chapel visible in the second image from the left compensates for orientation and scale. Neither space is a copy of the other but their similitude proclaims social and political affinity.

The easiest example of emulation outside of the piazza are the city’s bell towers, mostly derived as diminutions of San Marco’s brick behemoth. Several of these are visible in the second image from the top. More fundamental are the various social, economic, religious, and political institutions dotting the city. The Palazzo Ducale-- Venice’s governmental seat—acts as a touchstone for a particular network of social institutions, scuole, that played an essential role in maintaining the republic’s harmonic social stability. The scuole—part social club, part local government, part artistic patron, and part charitable organization—emulate the Palazzo Ducale’s administrative and architectural format.

The format is as rhetorical as it is structural and organizational. The Ducal Palace uses its striking white and pink façade—which only covers its two most visible sides—to promote a misleading external image. What appears as a massive, ornamented block from the piazza turns out to be a series of linear spaces bounding a substantial courtyard. Furthermore, this string of spaces is not continuous but made up of disparate wings erected in a series of campaigns. The wrapper façade deftly obviates the differences on the exterior. The second image from the right shows the space between two of the blocks. The facade’s characteristic stone lacework is visible against the sunlight streaming in.

The image to the far right shows one of my favorite scuole, that of S. Giovanni Evangelista. The scuola is highlighted in the map at top. While not a copy of the Palazzo Ducale, its architects use similar compositional, screening, and masking techniques to knit processional spatial sequences into grand organic coherence, with overt references to the Ducale’s grand meeting rooms and ceremonial stairways contained within.

*the map at top was scanned from Leonardo Benevolo's The History of the City and the view of San Marco below it was scanned from an on-site postcard