The Role of Spatial Networks in the Historic Urban Landscape: Learning from Venice in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

The 2011 Historic Urban Landscape Recommendation (HUL) by UNESCO defines cities as dynamic environments subject to cultural processes, tangible/intangible heritage and community values, leaving some key questions open. Is the heritage sector better defining historic places, or because their complexity defies verbal description, it re-iterates simplified concepts? Are existing boundaries between disciplines such as architecture, planning and landscape design enriching or constraining heritage? This paper analyses the urban morphology of Venice and the Piazza San Marco, a key context in which architecture emerges as legitimised vehicle for urban regeneration in early modernity. Looking at the relationship between the Piazza and the urban networks of Venice alongside intangible spatial practices and symbols, the paper makes three contributions to urban conservation: a) it defines the HUL as the interrelationship of the anonymous city with the authored products of design, b) it revisits the foundations of early modern consciousness about architecture, urban conservation and innovation in order to better understand interdisciplinary knowledge in the heritage sector and c) it approaches heritage as social construction, involving the selection of structures, from buildings to entire areas, and from legal documents and political instruments to ideologies through which societies are seen from dominant positions, often disguising conflict

Beyond analytical knowledge: The need for a combined theory of generation and explanation

Analytic approaches to design develop theories from real-world phenomena, and as such are predominantly focused on the ‘laws that restrict and structure the field of possibility’ (Hillier 1996: 221). However, in the domain of design we need theories of design possibility and actuality, or a combined theory of generation and explanation. Starting from the assertion that there are multiple branches of architectural knowledge, this paper discusses three artefacts (Venice, Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and Calvino’s Invisible Cities) suggesting that in these artefacts we recognise common morphogenetic characteristics, and the intersection of analytic thought with generative design. The aim is threefold: firstly, to explore the ways in which the common characteristics in the three works create syntaxes of combinations capable of describing the generative imagination as the outcome of definable processes and relations; secondly, to explain the importance of a theory in dynamic processes of interaction and association aside to static spatial structures. Thirdly, to show where we can situate these ideas in relation to intellectual and design practices, and how to project them in the future. It is proposed that the diversification of knowledge is the basic condition for the intersection of generative with analytical thought and the dynamic generation of meaning. The paper borrows from aesthetic and literary theory the notion of ‘possible worlds’ to take into account design as ‘worldmaking’ (Goodman 1978). It argues that analytic and generative knowledge are central in design, as each allows access to worlds whose centres of reality are not separate or fixed but interact and shift dynamically with creative activity and time. Aside to theories of explanation we need theories of generation or a combined theory of freedom and necessity in architecture and design

The Architecture of Twists and Turns: Space, Time and Narrative in the work of John Soane and Carlo Scarpa

Architecture has both interactive and analogical relationships with language. A designed building originates in a linguistic document, the design brief providing a list of functional categories and quantities. In the case of building programmes, such as libraries, museums and art galleries, the word-like function of the classifications of contents in space are preceded by classifications recorded in texts and reflecting the history of thought. The analogical relationship between architecture and language goes back to the 19th century and the idea that works of architecture should be read like books, narratives or texts (Forty, 2004). Quatremère de Quincy for example, likened historical monuments to libraries - public inscriptions or records of the people. This idea came under strong criticism in the 20th century after modernism asserted that buildings were to be read as autonomous works. Writing on the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art’s fifth anniversary in 1934 Alfred Barr, Jr., MoMA’s founding director, set up a dichotomy between an intellectual understanding of art mediated by words and a direct experience of art that comes from the unmediated encounter between the viewer and the object. ‘Words about art may help to explain techniques, remove prejudices, clarify relationships, suggest sequences, and attack habitual resentments through the back door of intelligence. But the front door of understanding is through experience of the work of art itself’ (Barr, 1934). Similarly to art, architecture has been affected by a longstanding assumption that ‘experiences mediated through the senses are fundamentally incompatible with those mediated through language’ (Forty 2004, 12). Yet, as Adrian Forty explains, even if architecture is not a language this does not lessen the value of language for understanding architecture. Bill Hillier for example, has made a productive analogy between the syntax of space and the syntactic and semantic structure of language. The characteristic spatial relationships that define the cultural inhabitation of space are similar to linguistic rules we use in speaking and writing, or the unconscious mechanisms we ‘think with’ (Hillier 1996). If ordinary language offers a paradigm for understanding the unconscious apparatus of meaning-making in architecture, what about the literary function of language? This question concerns works of architecture as intentional aesthetic systems rather than as unconscious structures shared within a society like language. It also allows literary narrative to function as a critical tool and a design tool as opposed to explanatory paradigm. If the principles of spatial structure function similarly to those of ordinary language, what can we say about narrative devices or rules used in literary texts? Or what about buildings as social objects, understood in a historical context and the ordering mechanisms of language to organize cultural messages and relations of power? In this essay I address these questions first, by focusing on how devices ordering our perception of space and time in literature can illuminate spatial practices as aesthetic systems; second, by exploring our perception of space-time in buildings housing collections, such as museums, galleries and exhibitions. Buildings devoted to displays share the assumption that the spatial arrangement of objects, supported by object-based interpretation, offer a narrative to be understood through the physical experience of reading, looking, and walking. This experience is staged by the linguistic strategies of classification, taxonomy and lists, and the architectural strategies of viewing sequences, mediating the encounter between the architect, the curator, the objects and the viewer. Museums, galleries and private collections therefore, are ideal candidates for addressing the analogic and interactive encounter of architecture with linguistic strategies and narrative form. The choice of these narrative strategies is critical when the container is itself a historical monument or is embedded in a historical context, as the meanings that are attached to the building and the displays can be motivated and invested with potential significance. Although separated by a century and a half, John Soane and Carlo Scarpa had a strong relationship with history and context as artistic practices and inspirational resources. Soane’s house-museum and Scarpa’s projects such as the Castelvecchio, the Olivetti Showroom and the Canova’s extension, seem to present a common paradigm: all housing collections, albeit Soane’s house-museum accommodates his own private collection; all fusing the architects’ own interventions within the existing fabric; all collaging contemporary architecture over the substrate of previous historical episodes; all eschewing the idea of a single unified form as the central governing composition by which the building could be read; all forcing the visitor into sinuous routes and around art works to see the building and the objects. For Nicholas Olsbeg, Scarpa opened the possibility for an architecture in union with poetry, sculpture, painting and craft around the themes of memory, allegory and metaphor (Olsberg, 1999). Soane also conceived his house-museum as a union of architecture with the arts, engaging in spatial optical mechanisms and an eccentric taste in narrative expression (Soane 1830, 1832, 1835-36). Deriving from these common tendencies for itineraries and multiple associations, works of the two architects present suitable examples to examine the perception of space, time and meaning, drawing parallels between motifs in architecture and narrative

Space and Planned Informality: strong and weak programme categorisation in public learning environments

Public educational buildings – such as schools, libraries, research centres and museum galleries – have complex and often conflicting requirements in terms of their programming and functioning. On the one hand, they need to provide open and equal access to knowledge to various categories of users. On the other, they have needs that might restrict or condition the arrangement of space, movement and various activities. At the same time, social and technological changes cause these typologies to change from within so as to include the idea of learning as a form of socialisation. These shifts imply complex or conflicting spatial, programmatic and organisational needs and point towards a hybridisation of strong and weak programme organisation (Hillier, Hanson, Peponis 1984; Hillier 1996). This paper looks at two public libraries in London: Kensington Central Library and Swiss Cottage Library. The questions studied through these libraries are: firstly, how these conflicting requirements of space, programme and use are manifested through their spatial structuring and social performance? Secondly, how do weak and strong programme aspects of these buildings influence their day-to-day functioning? Finally: what is the role of the space of these libraries in influencing the strengthening or weakening of the boundaries between these programmatic categories of activities? It is argued that although both libraries are similar in scale and programmatic description, they have a crucial difference: their spatial structure. This difference exposed the influence of the spatial manifestation of programme on the transpatial definition of programme. The combination of the position of activities in the spatial layout and the length of the description of such activities are pointed as fundamental aspects to be observed regarding the influence of programme in the actual use of space – especially the potential in generating unprogrammed social encounters. It is found that the KCL leans towards the strong and formal end of this programmatic typology, being a library of an academic character. The SCL on the other hand, intensifies the informal and weakly structured aspects of this typology, functioning as a library-community centre

Beyond two dimensions: architecture through three dimensional visibility graph analysis

Architecture consists of spatial relations that accommodate functions, afford social relations and create visual interest. Through openings and walls, architects manipulate continuities and discontinuities of visual fields in two and three dimensions. Analytical diagrams and models of these fields have been offered by space syntax, especially through visibility graph analysis (VGA), graphing visual relations in two dimensions. This paper introduces a new approach to VGA that departs from planar restrictions. We show how a graph can be generated of inter-visible locations on a planar surface that incorporates relations among elements in three dimensions. Using this method, we extend the current space syntax analysis of architectural space to a new methodology for diagramming and modelling three-dimensional visual relationships in architecture. The paper is structured in three parts. The first section provides an overview of the principles of visibility analysis using graphs, and explains the method by which visibility relations of ‘accessible’ and ‘inaccessible’ space in two and three dimensions are computed. This leads to a graph representation, which uses a mix of ‘directed’ and ‘undirected’ visibility connections, and a new multi-variant spatial categorisation analysis that informs the properties of multi-directional graphs. The second part of the paper tests the three-dimensional visibility model through the analysis of hypothetical and real spatial environments. The third part analyses Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio, describing architectural characteristics that are not captured by two-dimensional analysis, and allowing a comparative understanding of spatial configuration in two and three dimensions. The paper concludes with a discussion about the significance of this new model as an analytical and architectural tool

Experiencing three-dimensional museum environments: An investigation of the Ashmolean Museum and the Museum of Scotland

The relationship between the spatial organisation of museums and visitors' experience has been widely explored. However, previous studies rarely focused upon the actual use and effect of the atria on how people navigate. To understand this interaction entails answering the following research question: How exploration and movement in museums are affected by two and three-dimensional properties? This question is investigated by the comparative study of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford, renovated by Rick Mather Architects (2009), and the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, designed by Benson and Forsyth (1998). The two museums are selected as relevant cases for their spatial similarities and significant differences closely connected to the organisation of their atria. The intention is to understand whether atria account for similar or different exploration patterns in the ways users navigate in three dimensions. The comparative analysis, stemming from space use observations, space syntax methods and agent simulations, shows that significant differences in real and simulated movement result from the varying spatial positioning and character of the voids. Variability in spatial behaviour derives from the impact of the third dimension, assigning different identities and orientating capacities to the atria and the museums