The Venice Variations: Tracing the Architectural Imagination
- ISBN-10
- 1787352390
- ISBN-13
- 9781787352391
- Category
- Architecture
- Pages
- 332
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2018-04-30
- Publisher
- UCL Press
- Author
- Sophia Psarra
Description
From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development 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 need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2018-04-30
- 335 pages
- Paperback
- UCL Press
Similar books
-
CyberCities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication
By M. Christine Boyer52 Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake , “ Paradise Regained , ” Architecture 80 ( December 1991 ) : 48–51 ; the quotation is on pages 48–49 .
-
Steel Surfaces: A Guide to Alloys, Finishes, Fabrication, and Maintenance in Architecture and Art
By L. William Zahner... Joe, 211 Kelly, William, 12 Kieran Timberlake, 28, 29 killed steels, 22 Kure Beach (North Carolina), weathering evaluated in, 275 M machining, 225–226, ...
-
Creating Healthy Neighborhoods: Evidence-Based Planning and Design Strategies
By Ann Forsyth, Emily Salomon, Laura SmeadBrender, Jean D., Juliana A. Maantay, and Jayajit Chakraborty. 2011. ... Chris Frost, Katharine Ker, Rebecca Steinbach, Ian Roberts, and Reinhard Wentz.
-
The World by Design: The Story of a Global Architecture Firm
By A. Eugene Kohn, Clifford PearsonIn the Army and the Navy, everyone had both line and staff duties. Line duty was your primary mission—say, as a gunnery officer—which you did while being ...
-
Designing for Autism Spectrum Disorders
By Kristi Gaines, Angela Bourne, Michelle Pearson... The Faison School for Autism is a unique and welcoming learning environment that encompasses the needs of its students, staff, and families alike.
-
Manual: The Architecture of Kieran Timberlake
By Stephen Kieran, James Timberlake"A must for practitioners and students alike, Manual brings the process of design and details of architecture to life, revealing the beauty of building derived from composition within a tradition of innovative assembly."--BOOK JACKET.
-
KieranTimberlake - Fullness
By KieranTimberlakeProjects in this book include a house made from prefabricated modules in rural California that minimally disturbed its picturesque site; a major renovation of Philadelphia's Dilworth Park in front of City Hall; Cellophane House (TM), a ...
-
refabricating ARCHITECTURE: How Manufacturing Methodologies are Poised to Transform Building Construction
By Stephen Kieran, James TimberlakeThis thought-provoking book presents a compelling argument for moving architecture from a part-by-part, linear approach to an integrated one that brings together technology, materials, and production methods.
-
Cellophane House: KieranTimberlake
By Stephen Kieran, James Timberlake, KieranTimberlakeThrough a series of questions, the book explores several of KieranTimberlake's ongoing research agendas including speed of on-site assembly, design for disassembly, a holistic approach to the life cycle of materials, and the development of ...
-
Loblolly House: Elements of a New Architecture
By Stephen Kieran, James TimberlakeThrough the use of state-of-the-art building information modeling, the architects were able to streamline the design-build process. This is a manual for the componentized prefab.