Firenze: between the buildings

Firenze: the search for the poetry of geometry

Italia2009 once again found itself in Firenze… Between theory and practice, the work of Alberti captivated us. The Palazzo Rucellai and its accompanying Loggia (attributed to either Alberti or his influence) seemed to be theoretical projections reaching out into the city. Reason, or perhaps more appropriately, Ratio, was the filter through which the architect practiced. Alberti offers us something more however: a definition of the architect as well educated in all of the arts and sciences. With Alberti, the Medieval master-craftsman begins to fade altogether from the history of architecture. Clearly, this notion of the architect being educated in mathematics, geometry, music, rhetoric, literature, poetry, and philosophy has been abandoned today in favor of a very different course of education… that of training. What we may be loosing is the rich contamination of theory and practice. Are we on the brink of abandoning architecture altogether?

Ah! but Firenze embraces us! We turn from such theoretical discourse and are once again swept into the immediacy of the city… We trace Brunelleschi's work to Santo Spirito – a different, though still humanist, approach from Alberti. Here, Geometry is itself Reason. We paused on our walk at Santi Apostoli, an early Medieval basilica that represents a definite origin point for Santo Spirito. Spatially, Santo Spirito was amazing! Brunelleschi wraps the colonnade of the side aisle around the transept: a planar descision that results in a new spatial condition. The students were clearly taken with this, and after wandering throughout the building, settled down to sketch for an hour.

of stone and water…

a most improbable city…

Venice, that city of Pietro and Tullio Lombardo, Mario Coducci, Jacapo Sansavino… that most serene republic that floats upon the waters of a lagoon – her memory and desire are in the water… that city whose myths of origins and saints confront her pilings, stones, cisterns, campi, bridges, and canals – distance seems to collapse… that labyrinthine city of endless courtyards, campi, streets, and canals contain vast treasures and her eventual death…

After the Piazza at San Marco, we constructed a diagram: a line between the Doge's Palace and the Rialto linking the civic and religious center of the city with its engine of commerce and trade – beginning at the mouth of the Grand Canal and crossing it at the Rialto Bridge. Storytellers and historians weave their stories between these two points and between the mainland and the Adriatic. But, they are not ends, for they form a continuous loop whose cycles and continuity founded and preserved the city for centuries.

We followed the work of the Lombardo's – enraptured by Santa Maria Mirocoli (a "jewel box" indeed). We traced, in Istrian stone and marble, plaster and brick, the movement of Mario Coducci. We tried to decipher the thought of Sansovino and Scomozzi. In all of these architects and others, we found the threads of the narratives that constitute Venice.

And Scarpa…! Ah! that most excellent Venetian! He followed us in our passage and his voice seemed to resonate in the glass or Murano, the weightlessness of the facades along the Grand Canal, the careful way that the palaces and houses touched the water…

It may be the case that we will never leave Venice. Now that we have entwined ourselves around its images and stories, we may have become them or they us.

Venice…