Venice as a Paradigm. Urban Studies and the Value of Emptiness in the City's Design

This chapter will focus on the value of emptiness and the instrumental role of urban studies in architectural design, critically reconsidering certain modes of interpreting the city which matured starting from research on the urban form of Venice. Venice as a text, a pretext or, simply, a place of choice – a royal city of stone and brick made of built islands but also an ideal city made of paper, a vision of the mind’s eye of architects, geographers, writers, art historians, and philosophers. Venice as a paradigm to be questioned and a pretext for a “ Venetian” approach to the architectural project that is intertwined with the events of the Royal Higher Institute of Architecture, the second school of architecture in Italy after that of Rome, inaugurated in Venice in November 1934. For a certain Italian architectural culture, the city and the landscape were the foundation of a design approach based on the relationship between urban morphology and building typology. Text, context, pretext, are terms that have had a significant weight for the Italian architectural culture of the last century, and in the context of a daily theoretical elaboration, have been recoded and agreed over and over again and have assumed relevance also in the international context.