Architectural Strategies and Solutions | IN-BETWEEN SPACES, BORDERLINE PLACES
VERNACULAR CASE STUDY
#V2
THE CITY OF VENICE
ENVIRONMENTAL PRINCIPLES
VENETO, ITALY
to respect environmental context and landscape to benefit of natural and climatic resources to reduce pollution and waste materials to contribute to human health and welfare to reduce natural hazards effects
SOCIO-CULTURAL PRINCIPLES
authors Fernando Vegas, Camilla Mileto
to protect the cultural landscape to transfer construction cultures to enhance innovative and creative solutions to recognise intangible values to encourage social cohesion
SOCIO-ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES to support autonomy to promote local activities to extend building's lifetime to save resources
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to optimise construction efforts
The city of Venice owes a great deal of its charm to the extraordinary richness of in-between realms with binomials such as water/earth (the city itself with its buildings), water/air (the bridges), earth/air (the porticoed market and the many arcades and stilted terraces, called altane), indoors/outdoors (porches, porticoes, patios, terraces, etc.), private/public (different steps of privacy involved in the name of the streets like campo, campiello, calle, calletta, ruga, ramo, corte, etc.), trade/dwelling (trade shops, workshops, cantine, etc.), artificial/natural (lagoon, canals, park, gardens, etc.) and many hybrid and intermediate degrees between all of them. Venice is not the only aquatic town, but it is probably the best conserved in its urban design and configuration. In Venice planning was developed considering the presence of water as the major means of transportation, giving access to ground floor warehouses through porticoes, respecting a way out to the canals through the typical routes, etc. There are many bridges spread all throughout the city that cross the sky covering the water gap between built grounds, and one of them, Rialto bridge, even has shops built on it, showing an in-between habitat between the air and the water. Furthermore, the maze of walking streets incorporates subtle codes that progressively filter from the open public space to the most private one. This richness of variations between public and private spaces that may arrive in some cases to the meeting of four different intermediate spaces at once, does not only belong to Venice, since there are many other traditional cities that can boast of this richness (as is the case with many Islamic cities, for example), but it has certainly been very well preserved in this city.
• Semi-open stairway, Palace Contarini del Bovolo.
• Grand Canale with Rialto bridge on the back, Venice; typical inner private courtyard Venice; typical semiprivate corte at Venice. (photos: F. Vegas, C. Mileto)