Psarra, S; (2017) City-Craft and Statecraft: Architecture and the City in Humanist Urban Culture – the case of Venice. In: Heitor, T and Serra, M and Silva, JP and Bacharel, M and Cannas da Silva, L, (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th International Space Syntax Symposium. Instituto Superior Técnico, Departamento de Engenharia Civil, Arquitetura e Georrecursos: Lisbon, Portugal.

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Abstract

Architecture is defined by intentional design, while cities are the product of multiple human actions over a long period of time. This seems to confine us between a view of architecture as authored object and a view of the city as authorless socio-economic process. This debate goes back to the separation of architecture from its skill base in building craft that took place in the Renaissance, including its division from the processes by which cities are produced by clients, users, regulatory codes, markets and infrastructures. As a result, architecture is confined in exceptional cases to the status of iconic buildings, or more generally to the status of buildings as economic production. Currently, buildings and cities are appropriated by digital technology and ubiquitous computing as a way of managing the city’s assets. Digital technologies integrate designing with making, informational models of buildings with geographic information systems and digital mapping. What had to be separated from city-making practices in order to raise architecture to a different status is increasingly re-integrated through digital infrastructure. As for architecture, traditionally engaged with the design of objects rather than networks or systems, is deprived of relevance in shaping social capital, politically and intellectually sidelined. Focusing on the Piazza San Marco in relationship to the urban fabric of Venice this paper traces the interlocking spheres of self-conscious architecture, the institutional and intellectual resources mobilised by Venetian statecraft and the networked spaces of everyday action. It argues that the scenographic design of the Piazza annexed the urban structure of Venice, historiography and civic rituals to advocate a centralised city of ceremonial processions, exalting the state and the Republic. The intersection of architecture, theatre and the street reduced the complexity of the city into a theatrical set and used perspective to make it synoptically available to the eye. Tracing morphological paradigms of early modernity, this paper unravels the rise of architecture as an elitist practice parallel to the rise of the state, and a theoretical framework for theorising its relationship with the city.

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