Advanced Design Studio, Eisenman

Venice Project 1

Alvise Cornaro and the Venetian Laguna

Background

In 1560 Alvise “Luigi” Cornaro published an aricordo, or report, outlining a radical restructuring of the Venetian Laguna. The plan called for the erection of two artificial islands in the Bacino of San Marco and the construction of a fountain in the Piazza. One island, a “shapeless little hill,” would be built from mud dredged from the Venetian canals and topped with a loggia. The other would be a public theater, in the Roman Classical style, that would rise directly from the water. The proposal, developed six years before Cornaro’s death at the age of 82, followed on a lifetime of architectural patronage (Cornaro commissioned a villa and garden loggia by Giovanni Maria Falconetto), experimentation with hydraulics and land reclamation, and a dilettante’s devotion to the theater. While Cornaro traced his bloodline to the noble family of the same name, Venetian officials repeatedly denied his petitions for the formal recognition of this lineage. He did succeed, however, in securing official status for his descendents: he arranged the marriage of his daughter to a recognized Cornaro. As a result of his rejection by the Venetian aristocracy, Cornaro spent much of his life in Padua where he came to represent the political and economic interests of the mainland. He focused on expanding his small inheritance through land reclamation efforts and the promotion of agrarian practices in the Veneto. His plan for the Laguna can be read in the context of these interests. The Venetian Water Authority, under the advice of Cristoforo Sabbadino, viewed the embankments employed by reclamation as harmful to the tidal equilibrium of the Laguna. Sabbadino’s plans—which, unlike Cornaro’s, came to define a century of management techniques—demanded the redirection of river mouths away from the Laguna in an attempt to reduce the deposit of silts. His plan was concerned primarily with the preservation of the Laguna as a natural entity. Cornaro’s plan, on the other hand, proposed the bounding of the Lagoon—its domestication. Cornaro called for the construction of a sea wall that would surround Venice, while embankments built up on the perimeter of the islands would be planted with dense groves of trees. Both embankments and the construction of static artificial islands would describe the Laguna as an iconic and permanent urban form. Even the sets Cornaro proposed for his theater would be fixed. The opposition between water and land, the mainland and the Laguna, sets up a series of dialectical relationships that provide both a program of historical analysis and suggest potential design strategies. In Cornaro’s plan, the appearance of a theater (representative of culture and politics) in the Laguna, or of a wooded grove (representative of the mainland), or of the fountain (fresh water), suggest the destabilization of these oppositions.

The Archipelago

Often credited as an influence on Andrea Palladio, whom he met in 1538, Cornaro was an early proponent of the revival of classical forms. His interest, however, in the revival of classical program—in particular the theaters of antiquity—arrived late in life. In his most extensive essay on architecture, the Trattato dell’Architettura from 1547, he decides against writing on “theaters, amphitheaters, thermae…because…these other buildings are no longer used.”* Setting aside the historical issue of the revival of the ancient theater, what does it mean for Cornaro to propose the building of classical Roman forms in the Laguna? Pier Vittorio Aureli’s recent analysis of Palladio offers some clues. Aureli locates two urban origins of Palladio’s practice: Palladio’s guidebook to Rome and Cornaro’s proposal for the Bacino. Both, Aureli argues, understand the city as an “archipelago of monuments,” whether in a narrative sense, via the fragmented trajectory of the guidebook, or literally, as with Cornaro’s islands. The building “a la Romana,” displaced both spatially and temporally, read in relation to other such monuments, suggests an alternative and definitively public urban fabric. The archipelago refers to another order overlaid on the existing (Gothic) city plan. But this new plan erupts only at particular points and is never unresponsive to the existing context. It is this concept of overlay which will be one of the theoretical propositions of the studio.

Détournement

In the context of the above, we will examine Cornaro’s proposal in light of the later developments by Palladio. But we will also examine this technique of overlay as not simply a mode of montage or collage (though Tafuri will refer to Palladio’s urbanism as that of “mental montage.”†) Instead, we will turn to the urban strategies developed by Guy Debord and the Situationists in the sixties, specifically, the concept of “détournement.” Debord defines détournement, in The Society of the Spectacle, as “the antithesis of quotation.” Rather than rendering fragments, détournement determines a language whose “internal coherence and its adequacy in respect of the practically possible are what validate the ancient kernel of truth that it restores.”‡The relationship between the internal coherence of this “anti-ideological” language and its destabilizing and critical effects at work in the present will form the basis of an urban analysis. We will understand Cornaro’s proposal as a first step toward this method of critical urban reading. The goal of the class will be to adapt other strategies of détournement directed toward the rethinking of the Laguna as an urban archipelago. Détournement will also serve to direct our ongoing investigation of the relationship between architecture and representation. If architecture traditionally maintains a one-to-one correspondence, even coincidence, between the signifier and its signified (ie: a column must both appear as structure and act structurally), the inversion of meaning carried out in détournement suggests the possibility of unmooring architecture from this formulation. Particular forms, redeployed, might effect radically different meanings. Cornaro’s proposal will provide a point of departure for simultaneously interrogating this relationship between architecture and representation at an urban scale.

The project as envisioned in this studio will be the first in a series of three annual studios.

Schedule

Process

1. Analysis: the first phase of the work will be an analysis of the context both real, historical and today. We will analyze the different plans proposed at that time for Venice and the reasons behind them.
2. Design: using a process of détournement, and beginning from Cornaro’s scheme we will attempt to keep his project somewhat intact while changing its critical meaning for today. What that means and how it is to be done is the subject of the studio. The result is to be manifest in tectonic means appropriate to the site’s history and today’s context.

Travel

We will travel to Venice during normal travel week. We will spend one day visiting Palladio’s villas in the Veneto, one day in Vicenza, one day viewing Palladio’s churches in Venice, and another at the Venice Biennale. During the visit, we will be joined by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Massimo Scolari, Francesco Dal Co and others.