Chapter Title: Preface

Book Title: Venice Variations

Book Subtitle: Tracing the Architectural Imagination
Book Author(s): Sophia Psarra
Published by: UCL Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctvqhspn.2

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Variations

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vi

Preface

The need to imagine an ideal place for living in defines a basic human
condition deeply embedded in our cultural memory. From Paradise and
the myth of Arcadia through to the twentieth-​century Modernist utopias
and contemporary ideas about sustainability, imagining better urban
environments remains persistently and remarkably relevant, raising
recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing
both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery? By which
mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? How do they
adapt and sustain themselves over time? For architects, planners or
simply anyone interested in better buildings and cities, these questions
concern the interaction of the urban places created collectively with the
power of conscious design and the individual imagination. But while
past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary
definitions of exemplary models of urban design seek technological
solutions and paradigms of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations
explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique and holistic
answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result
of a preconceived ideal, but the pragmatic outcome of informal social
and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though,
came to represent the quintessential combination of place, buildings and
institutions of its time.
Through a discussion of Venice and two works owing their inspir-
ation to this city –​Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice
Hospital –​the book describes Venice as a system that emerges like the
­outcome of a highly probabilistic algorithm, that is,  a structure with a
small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations.
In The Venice Variations I pursue an uncompromising argument suggesting
that, deep down, the rapidly escalating processes of urban development
in train around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival,
shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing
these places as problems to be solved, we should regard them as complex

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vi

systems with the capacity to evolve, as Venice did from its unprepos-
sessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’
that endured a thousand years. The book thus attempts to free Venice
from stereotypical representations, to reveal its generative capacity to
inform potential other ‘Venices’ in the future.

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ix

Acknowledgements

I remember the Theofania well, the Feast of Epiphany or the Feast of

Lights, the quayside liturgical ceremony incorporating the Blessing of
the Waters. Resplendent in his gold embroidered vestments, the priest
would hurl the sacred cross into the sea. Peals of church bells rang out as
teenage ​divers plunged eagerly into the freezing water in a race to recover
it. On summer mornings, the market vendors’ voices were drowned out
by the ships’ horns echoing ashore from the sea. On bank holidays, the
crowds cheered at students and scouts marching with flags fluttering
in the wind. In the evenings, the places of worship and the fishermen’s
boats turned on their lights, like seafaring vessels of souls starring the
dark sea. This was a city nurtured by an intimate and time-​honoured rela-
tionship with the water, ritual and trade.
The Venice Variations is inspired by two things:  Italo Calvino’s
Invisible Cities, a prose  poem for cities, and my fascination with living,
working cities. I grew up in a coastal town bordering the southern Ionian
Sea amidst the remnants of the Mycenaean, Spartan, Roman, Byzantine,
Frankish, Venetian and Ottoman empires. Of all empires, Venice was the
most immanent, from everyday customs to winged lions on fortifications
and a local dialect resonant with a legacy of ‘winged words’.  We had,
of course, forgotten, but language ‘remembered’, as we took strolls on
the Molo and ate fresh dolci and delicious preserved naranza. Venice
lay veiled from consciousness, until the day I  scrutinised a map of the
city, floating in its distant lagoon. Some instinct told me to start work
from the squares of the Serenissima; from the campi (squares), where the
spectacle of the water meets the façade of the church; where the stroller
encounters the grocery boat, and the gondolier picks up his passengers
at the steps by the bridge. My interest in Venice ignited at that moment,
from that intuition derived from four thousand years of Greco-​Roman
tradition, from the patios with the deep wells, the feast days and the
processions. Other places  –  ​the grand mansions with their waterfront
loggias, and their Venetian shutters scoured by sea salt, the walled gar-
dens, the citrus trees, the anachronous train station, the warehouses

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x

harbouring raisins and figs, the textile workshops, the cigarette factories,
the sandy marshlands, the mills, the river with its mud flats and reeds – ​
were filling the memory gaps, bridging the spaces in between.
The place I set out to explore in the book is not tourist Venice, his-
toric Venice or today’s Venice as a museum, but Venice as a cosmopolitan
working city, built on water by the forces of travel, ritual, immigration
and commerce. The book interrogates the imagination in Venice, seeing
this city as the prototype for other cities. Venice is one of the most intense
manifestations of how urban places are founded and evolve, revealing,
to those prepared to enquire, the operations and the creativity that bring
them into being. What I pursue here is the integration of the imagination
with analytical explication, the synthesis of architecture, urbanism, lit-
erature and the extension of Calvino’s literary ideas into an architectural
and urban discourse. In the realm of architecture there is no provincial
separation, no adversarial loyalties to either buildings or cities, creative
practice or analytical work, imaginative or rational thought. There is only
the vital drive to create and illuminate, by whatever means, memory and
drawing, history and analysis, numbers and words, reflection combined
with speculation and the imaginative synthesis of all these complemen-
tary modes of thought.
In recent years, I  have become increasingly concerned about the
regeneration of de-​industrialised areas, the economic adversities and
land privatisation that threaten our urban civilisation with cultural
amnesia. It is not nostalgia for the pre-​modern or modern industrial
past that motivates this book, but a desire to rethink cities so that their
generative activities once more bestow a diversity of economic oppor-
tunities, products and people; to revisit and rethink the history of their
evolution; to unlock our cities from the sterility of being frozen in time; to
restore their natural ability to continuously adapt their productiveness,
their public spaces and civic democracy, without the artificial imposition
of iconic architecture, corporate offices and postmodern museums; to
defy the exclusive, and obsessive, celebration of economic performance,
stripping architecture bare of political and social significance and the
potential for imaginative cultural innovation. The result, paradoxically,
is that the actuality of Venice, the city in a gradual process of political
and economic decline since the fifteenth century, is replaced by some-
thing even more potent and more universal –​the idea of Venice. I hope
that Venice and the idea of Venice live long, for the benefit of all cities,
and for all of us.
The Venice Variations advances an argument that cities, buildings and
books are all results of individual and collective effort. Many hands and

x Acknowledgements

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minds have helped me to negotiate Venice’s tangled paths. I am grateful

to Chris Penfold and his colleagues at UCL Press for their continuous
support for this project and more broadly the general project of open
access publishing. I would like to thank the Bartlett School of Architecture
for funding a sabbatical dedicated to producing my manuscript and to
colleagues who generously covered for me in my absence. I am indebted
to the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their encourage-
ment and critical evaluation. I also want to thank in particular Alan Penn,
Jane Rendell and John Peponis, each of whom has provided me in their
own way with inspiration and support; and  Margarita Greene, Murray
Fraser, Sam Griffiths, Daniel Koch, Marina Lathouri and Patricia Austin,
who invited me to lecture about Venice, providing opportunities to test
out the rigour of these propositions and their appeal to students.
I would like to thank Jonathan Smith for his helpful edits, while
secluded on ‘vacation’ on the Greek island of Samothraki, enhancing the
manuscript with his powerful grasp of language and sense for ‘winged
words’. Likewise, I am thankful to Stefania Maggiato at the Cartoteca of
IUAV, the SAND North GIS Lab at the Taubman College of Architecture
and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, and the librarians of UCL.
My appreciation and gratitude go to all those who have given me permis-
sion to reproduce their images in this book.
I was fortunate to have the warm friendship and unquestioned
support of Tania Oramas Dorta and Conrad Kickert, who, at various
times, carried out analyses of Venice and GIS mapping; Athina
Lazaridou, who constructed the three-​ dimensional illustrations of
Venice and the buildings of Palladio and Le Corbusier; Kirsty McMullan,
who made many of the maps and drawings in this book more attractive
and legible;  Tasos Varoudis, who helped with the analysis of the
Piazza San Marco; Olimpia Cermasi, who secured many of the image
permissions; and Garyfallia Palaiologou, who provided me with the first
drawings of the Venice Hospital. My PhD students Mariana Pestana,
Nazila Maghzian, Marcela Aragüez and Pinar Aycaç provided me with
intellectual nourishment throughout, an invaluable support. Kimon
Krenz, Fani Kostourou and Caue Capillè inspired me with their adven-
turous spirit and dedication to the integration of the design studio with
analysis and research.
Special thanks go to my first teachers and mentors at UCL, Bill
Hillier and Julienne Hanson, whose ideas provided me with intellec-
tual inspiration throughout.  The colleagues who have offered various
kinds of support and intellectual stimulation deserve my gratitude: Sonit
Bafna, Michael Benedikt, Meta Berghauser Pont, John Bingham-Hall, Ben

Acknowledgements xi

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xi

Campkin, Caroline Constant,  Ava Fatah, Sean Hanna, Penelope

Haralambidou,  Teresa Heitor,  Nick Helm, Jonathan Hill, Frederico
de Holanda, Deborah Howard, Roger Hubeli, Aarati Kanekar, Kayvan
Karimi, Jian Kattein, Joss Kiely, Daniel Koch, Perry Kulper, Julie Larsen,
Ann Legeby, Iris Likourioti, Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Lars Marcus, Vinicius
Netto, Alan Penn, Barbara Penner, John Peponis, Peg Rawes, Kerstin
Sailer, David Seamon, Tania Sengupta, Richard Sennett, Adam Sharr,
Bob Sheil, Ermal Shpuza, Lydia Soo, Phil Steadman, Vaso Trova, Brian
Trump, Laura Vaughan, Reem Zako, and all colleagues and students at
the Bartlett School of Architecture.
Finally, I thank my husband Tony for rescuing me from the ‘stones
of Venice’ with his sense of humanity, patience and unstinting support.
The Venice Variations is for him.
Sophia Psarra
London, 2018

xii Acknowledgements

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