City of Mask: Unveil the Entanglement between the Sacred and the Profane

The City of Mask Unveil the entanglement between the sacred and the profane

TABLE OF CONTENT

Prologue 1. Piazza San Marco, the City of Venice 2. The Site ProjectNT

City 1. Reflection on the New City within the existing city 2. Drawings

Epilogue 1. Appendix 1: Capriccio + Folly 2. Appendix 2: Diary

Bibliography

PROLOGUE The New City

01

Piazza San Marco, the City of Venice

The area adjacent to the Piazza San Marco was chosen as the site.

than a millennium, this area is the most visited and visitors come here of the smallest sestieri, the San Marco has most of the city’s landmar theatricality of Venice’s unique built environment by unveiling the e Right next to the Piazza San Marco, Venetian courtyard houses are t has the most diversity of Venice while representing the greatest para

As the commercial, religious, and political heart of the city for more

e trying to get a glimpse into the real Venetian world. Although it’s one rks scattered throughout the neighbourhood. This site best shows the entangled relationship between the sacred and the profane of the city. tightly arranged, leaving narrow alleyways and small alleys. This site adox of Venice.

02

The Site Project

New city Perspecti

ive From The Canal

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CITY The City of Mask:

Unveil the entanglement between the sacred and the profane

01

Reflection

The City of Mask: Unveil the entanglement between the sacred and the profane “Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” — Oscar Wilde Does the myth of Venice still exist today? Every year thousands of tourists flock to Venice to explore the mythical Venice. However, what they do not know is that Venice has become a consumer paradise that has been carefully masked. While the old historic facades have become the beguiling masks concealing all the artificial behind, visitors think they can get a glimpse of the real Venetian life by stepping into the quaint courtyard houses, but they would find the houses have been transformed for the modern mythmaking. As being commercialized into department stores, many houses were turned into monuments symbolizing the deprivation of the sacred civic life. The scaffolded corridors took up the narrow alleyways and small alleys, offering predetermined routes to lead visitors to circulate around the commercial spaces. The churches also collided with the surrounding buildings. Under the mask of the original facades, the interiors of the churches were changed to accommodate the needs of the burgeoning consumerism and contemporary events. When the historical and religious churches juxtapose with the modern structure and new functions, the sacred is entangled with the secular, thus new possibilities are born, and new myths are created.

Many of Venice’s historical typologies which once collectively served for the city’s very important civic life have fallen into the fate of “masking up” in order to catch up with modernity. Despite the unfortunate transformation into a victim of commercialism, the myth of Venice keeps evolving while crowds of people are still attracted to Venice to explore the myths themselves.

02

Drawings

Perspective fro

om the canal

Isometric of th

he New City

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The Basilica Theatre Isometric

The Church Night Club Isometric

The Church/ Gallery Isometric

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The Basilica Theatre 1F Plan

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The Basilica Theatre 2F Plan

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The Basilica Theatre Section A

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The Basilica Theatre Section B

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The Church Night Club GF Plan

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The Church N

Night Club Section A

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The Church/ G

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Fragment Details

Fragment Details

View Towards The Piazza San M

Marco at The Basilica Theatre

Overlooking The Dancing Flo

oor at The Church Night Club

Courtyard View of T

The Church/Gallery

Epilogue

01

Appendix 1: Capriccio + Folly

Project 1. Capriccio Delirious Manhattan Architect: OMA

Valerio-Recchioni_2017-A Passage to Rome Trombadori Lina bo Bardi

Project 1. Capriccio Venice: The Vertical City Architect: John Hejduk

Carl Laubin_2008-Cinquecentenario

Under the Mask of Facade “All this serious ostentatiousness, all this ego… hide a certain fragility, a feeling of inadequacy, and above all a series of untruths.”

— The Great Beauty (2013)

Veniceland: the theme park “Take chances, make mistakes. It’s not about being rational, it’s about following your heart.”

— One is glad to be of service

Reimagining the corridor “They have to make decisions, they have to gamble.”

— Success in filmmaking is a mystery to everyone (Kenneth Lonergan)

02

Appendix 2: Diary

Drama and Project: The Little Scientific Theatre of Aldo Rossi (by Daniela Sá) Character, Set, or Play can be integrated into one and other.

Analogous City, Aldo Rossi

The Teatro Olimpico, Andrea Palladio

Prometeo Music Space by Renzo Piano in San Lorenzp (turning a church into a theatre)

The Teatro Olimpico by Andrea Palladio

A. Rossi visiting Teatro Olimpico – Fixed onstage scenery, Scamozzi, Vicenza, (1584-1585)

City As A Theatre (Carnival) Aldo Rossi: “Without an event there is no theatre and no architecture.”

Oscar Wilde: “Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

Good plaza design subtly defines the space of the stage and the parterre for this ever-changing and always captivating play.

Fixed Scene of theatre —— theatre must be stationary, stable, and irreversible, but this seems true for all architecture.

“The permanence in the urban structure will state the hypothesis of a autonomy of form that underlies the variability of its use, of time and space, being somehow elementary, essential and intensely connected to memory.”

Turn the scene of the representation into an experience —— bring architecture into play.

Character —— visitors; Set —— architecture; Play —— interactivity Visitors become both spectator and participants Architecture become the fixed scene of theatre Myth vs. Masque, Decay vs. Renewal, Eternal vs. Ephemeral The myths of the city of Venice were embodied in civic, religious and patriotic festivals.

“Its architecture speaks of flaunted beauty, the hearts of the buildings are put on stage to declare themselves. The pageantry is everywhere, especially where not everyone can enter, but also in the facades to declare it and to declare the difficulty in eradicating it.”

Site: Canaregio or Piazza San Marco or Cimitero di San Michele?

San Marco itself is a theatre and a silent witness of all events and time.

Cimitero di San Michele is a cemetery but also a stage for celebrating the ritual of death.

The Sensa rites came to be the center of the vast spring carnival and festive inauguration of the theater season.

The city which rose from the sea celebrated a ritual ceremony; la Festa della Sensa, or the “Ascension.” Resembling both a sacrifice to Neptune, and a benediction, it symbolized the the mystical marriage between the sea and Venice, a sea-born Venus.

Think about duality in architecture?

Rialto was the seat of trade and economy, Place Saint-Mark was the place where were placed side by side the devotion to the patron saint and Political Power.

It unites Basilica Saint-Mark, the Bell tower with its bells and the Doge’s Palace where they elect the Doge who domiciles there.

This neighborhood translates perfectly the nearness of Secular and the Spiritual in Venice.

The visitor arriving in Venice is still transported into another world, one whose atmosphere and beauty remain incomparable.

Indeed, Venice seems to have transformed itself into a protected “museum-city” with very little in the way of real urban communities or a cultural life apart from that designed for outsiders.

Cultural heritage: the myth of Venice Reacting to their physical environment and to a variety of cultural influences—from Italy, northern Europe, and the East—the Venetians consciously designed their city as an exceptional place.

They regarded it as a divinely ordained centre of religious, civic, and commercial life, a community blessed by St. Mark, protected by its lagoon, and governed by a balanced constitution incorporating monarchy, aristocracy, and republican liberty.

Historians refer to this perception as the “myth of Venice.” The architecture of the city, especially in the Renaissance, purposely emulated republican Rome, and the great rituals of state—the doge’s procession from his palace to the basilica or the annual Marriage with the Sea, when the doge cast a gold ring into the lagoon as a “sign of true and perpetual dominion”—publicly expressed the myth.

Cemeteries, cities, territories A cemetery is an island in the territory, for example, Saint-michel reflects this fact in a unique way. place to surpass, the fence is liberated from profitability.

Isolated urban fragments extracted from an ordinary world, completely dedicated to memory, from urban or historical developments.

Architecture is a tool that connects time and place, and if time is invisible, then cemeteries are capable of summoning the existence of all time contained within them, creating places that evoke great emptiness.

It stimulates our memory and provides the most detached place for architecture. Because it reflects the duality between the two: life and death, memory and fantasy, fact and dream.

This is an ideal setting from which we can rehearse our reflections. In time (short and eternal), stay alive. Memories, and those of those who have passed away, emphasize the transience of our existence as well as the maintenance of daily life.

Adolf Luce: “There is only a small part of architecture that corresponds to the realm of art: funeral monuments and memorials. In our time, not only customs have changed, but beliefs, mindsets, funeral codes, funeral rituals, etc. (banned by the Catholic Church until 1964, and always growing in this way) and collective performance, draw a new scenes surrounding the cemetery image. It may involve fundamental changes in what we know as tombs and the disappearance of cemeteries. So it’s possible to think that in 50 years, many of these areas will begin to dry up, making way for future demolition processes, cemeteries that were unthinkable until now. Just as we are the archaeologists of the future, current cemeteries may become new ruins within a few years and then leave these spaces again.

The city, noticing a new cycle of displacement and absorption in space and time.

All creation is temporary and transitory, but from the beginning longs for eternity.

San Michele Cemetery, Venice, Italy The Venetian islands are steeped in history, famously inspiring some of history’s most eminent artistic figures. Located directly across the lagoon from the Fondamente Nuove, San Michele Island is Venice’s cemetery island, formed of two islands now joined and solely occupied by tombs, chapels and cypress trees. Considered a sacred place as opposed to a tourist attraction, a visit to San Michele offers an important insight into the history of Venice and its inhabitants.

A former monastery, it wasn’t until 1837 that Napoleon declared the island an official cemetery. The cemetery is split into sections: Catholic, Orthodox (known as the Greco), Protestant, Commonwealth War Dead and even gondoliers. The majority of remains interred here are housed in the long avenues and rows of tombs, many of which feature photos of the deceased. The Chiesa di San Michele in Isola, a Renaissance masterpiece begun in 1469 by Codussi and is thought to be the first Renaissance design in Venice – an inspiration for the monuments that followed. In stark contrast, San Michele is also home to the strikingly modern Courtyard of the Four Evangelists, part of the ongoing project by David Chipperfield Architects that aims to redress the imbalance of San Michele’s romantic façade with its public purpose as a municipal cemetery. This sleek courtyard features basalt-clad walls engraved with scripture from the gospels of the Four Evangelists.

Giuseppe Zampieri, design director and partner of DCA Milan, explains the genesis of the Chipperfield design partly as a reaction to the existing layout of the site. ‘Being an island cemetery in the Venetian lagoon, the conditions of San Michele make it pretty unique,’ he says. ‘In recent years, however, the increasingly municipal character has become a contrast to its romantic exterior. Our design tried to address this imbalance and restore some of the cemetery’s original monumental physical qualities. Rather than the existing arrangement of tombs in parallel rows, the scheme is a new arrangement of walls enclosing rectangular courtyards. The walls are blind on the exterior but lined with burial recesses internally to emphasise this interiority and sense of intimacy.’

St Mark’s Square The piazza has been mantained as a monumental social spaces with its own system. However, despite its grandeur, the piazza has been largely abandoned by the Venetians.

The Doges’ Palace The palace was the core of political life in Venice—not only the residence of the elected doge (duke) but also the meeting place of the republic’s governing councils and ministries.

St Mark’s Basilica The Basilica of St Mark, situated at the geographical and spiritual heart of the city, was the focus of civic and religious festivities according to elaborate protocols that then radiated outwards through Venice’s other institutional and ceremonial spaces.

Bell tower and Loggetta At the base of the Campanile is the Loggetta, a colonnaded portico designed by Sansovino. Constructed of red Verona marble and embellished with white marble of Carrara, verde antique (a mottled green marble), and white Istrian limestone, the Loggetta was intended to serve as a suitable backdrop for Venetian noblemen to gather before processing in state to the Doges’ Palace. It was crushed by the collapse of the Campanile in 1902 but was meticulously restored using its original materials. The Loggetta now serves as a foyer for tourists waiting to use the bell tower’s elevator.

The Old Library It maintains thousands of works printed between the 16th and 17th centuries and is believed to hold the greatest collection of classical texts in the world. Not only that, but it is among the oldest public manuscript depositories in Italy still in existence. Also significant for its art, the library holds many works by the great painters of sixteenth-century Venice, making it a comprehensive monument to Venetian Mannerism.

Procuratie and Ala Napoleonica The beauty of Piazza San Marco is largely due to the elegant symmetry and harmony of its three sides, enlivened by the burst of the basilica’s over-the-top architecture. The north and south sides of Piazza di San Marco are bordered by the Procuratie, the former offices of the Procurators, the chief officials of the Republic. Today, the buildings house the Museo Civico Correr, Museo del Risorgimento, and the Museo Archeologico.

St Mark’s Sqaure Plan a. St Mark’s Basilica b. Doges’ Palace c. Bell tower and Loggetta d. Marciana Library e. Mint f. Procuratie Nuove g. Napoleonic wing h. Procuratie Vecchie i. Clock tower

San Giorgio and La Salute turn the open lagoon in front of San Marco into an aquatic extension of the piazza. Il Redentore is linked to Venice proper by a temporary bridge every July on the Feast of the Redeemer, when illuminated boats fill the Giudecca Canal and there is a display of fireworks.

A growing problem for Venice is the loss of population from the city core.

It threatens to turn Venice into a museum city—a glorious spectacle whose architectural and artistic heritage is preserved, as it should be, but whose daily life is almost a parody of the vital unity of commerce, piety, politics, and ritual that was the pride of la serenissima.

San Marco Basilica was the city’s chief monument, temple of civic life as well as of religious faith, bearing witness to the greatness of Venice.

For about one thousand years it functioned as Ducal Chapel, coming directly under the Doge who nominated its Primicerius, with episcopal authority, and as State Church under the supervision of the Procurators of Saint Mark.

Venetian historical typologies

Courtyard

Archway

Bridge

Chimney

Altana

Well

Facade

Alleyway

Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial: Field of Otherness Architect Peter Eisenman designed the Berlin Holocaust Memorial without plaques, inscriptions, or religious symbols. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is without names, yet the strength of the design is in its mass of anonymity. The solid rectangular stones have been compared to tombstones and coffins.

After the slabs were in place, the cobblestone pathways were added.

Visitors to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe can follow a labyrinth of pathways between the massive stone slabs. Architect Eisenman explained that he wanted visitors to feel being lost in space and time.

Venice Hospital by Le Corbusier in 1965

Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute Santa Maria della Salute (English: Saint Mary of Health), commonly known simply as the Salute, is a Roman Catholic church and minor basilica located at Punta della Dogana in the Dorsoduro sestiere of the city of Venice, Italy.

It stands on the narrow finger of Punta della Dogana, between the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal, at the Bacino di San Marco, making the church visible when entering the Piazza San Marco from the water. The Salute is part of the parish of the Gesuati and is the most recent of the so-called plague churches.

In 1630, Venice experienced an unusually devastating outbreak of the plague.

As a votive offering for the city’s deliverance from the pestilence, the Republic of Venice vowed to build and dedicate a church to Our Lady of Health (or of Deliverance, Italian: Salute). The church was designed in the then fashionable baroque style by Baldassare Longhena, who studied under the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi. Construction began in 1631. Most of the objects of art housed in the church bear references to the Black Death.

Beginning in the summer of 1630, a wave of the plague assaulted Venice, and until 1631 killed nearly a third of the population. In the city, 46,000 people died whilst in the lagoons the number was far higher, some 94,000. Repeated displays of the sacrament, as well as prayers and processions to churches dedicated to San Rocco and San Lorenzo Giustiniani had failed to stem the epidemic. Echoing the architectural response to a prior assault of the plague (1575–76), when Palladio was asked to design the Redentore church, the Venetian Senate on October 22, 1630, decreed that a new church would be built. It was not to be dedicated to a mere “plague” or patron saint, but to the Virgin Mary, who for many reasons was thought to be a protector of the Republic.

It was also decided that the Senate would visit the church each year. On November 21 the Feast of the Presentation of the Virgin, known as the Festa della Madonna della Salute, the city’s officials parade from San Marco to the Salute for a service in gratitude for deliverance from the plague is celebrated. This involved crossing the Grand Canal on a specially constructed pontoon bridge and is still a major event in Venice.

The desire to create a suitable monument at a place that allows for easy processional access from Piazza San Marco led senators to select the present site from among eight potential locations. The location was chosen partially due to its relationship to San Giorgio, San Marco, and Il Redentore, with which it forms an arc. The Salute, emblematic of the city’s piety, stands adjacent to the rusticated single story customs house or Dogana da Mar, the emblem of its maritime commerce, and near the civic center of the city. A dispute with the patriarch, owner of the church and seminary at the site, was resolved, and razing of some of the buildings began by 1631. Likely, the diplomat Paolo Sarpi and Doge

Nicolo Contarini shared the intent to link the church to an order less closely associated with the patriarchate, and ultimately the Somascan Fathers, an order founded near Bergamo by a Venetian nobleman Jerome Emiliani, were invited to administer the church.

Longhena’s proposal was a concrete architectural plan, detailing the structure and costs. He wrote: “I have created a church in the form of a rotunda, a work of new invention, not built in Venice, a work very worthy and desired by many. This church, having the mystery of its dedication, being dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, made me think, with what little talent God has bestowed upon me of building the church in the ... shape of a crown.”

While Longhena saw the structure as crown-like, the decorative circular building makes it seem more like a reliquary, a ciborium, and embroidered inverted chalice that shelters the city’s piety.

The Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice

Walls as Rooms: British Castles and Louis Kahn Louis Kahn was known for his interest in Scottish Castles, by which he elaborated the distinction between ‘served’ and ‘servant spaces’, “with great central living halls and auxiliary spaces nestled into thick outside walls”. The castles were a strong inspiration for later works such as the Unitarian Church in Rochester and Erdman Hall at Bryn Mawr College.

Deep set shutters and a general work on the façade’s thickness were introduced during the design process of Fisher house. From the thesis “LOUIS I. KAHN’S FISHER HOUSE: A CASE STUDY ON THE ARCHITECTURAL DETAIL AND DESIGN INTENT by Pierson William Booher”.

Axonometric of Villa Garches by Le Corbusier

Floor Plan of Villa Garches by Le Corbusier

Axonometric of Le Corbusier’s Still Life, 1920; layering of frontal planes, & Le Corbusier’s Still Life, 1920.

The layering and stratification of frontal planes is evident in both Le Corbusier’s paintings as well as his built works. Articulated layered compositions, through the device of stratification, typifying phenomenal transparency are seen in Le Corbusier’s Still Life of 1920, which is then applied to the design of his Villa Stein in Garches of 1927/28. The axonometrics demonstrate the layered configurations of both works; they appear to stretch out and expand the various constituent layers of their flattened conditions as painting or elevation.

Eisenman describes the flattened layered elevations of Le Corbusier’s painting and his Villa Stein as being plans tipped to an upright position, allowing one to simultaneously perceive the whole from a singular viewpoint (Eisenman, 2007).

(left): Section (top) and Plan (bottom) of Loo’s Moller House (Vienna, 1927-8); diagonal arrow denotes the Journey of the Gaze passing though the successive planes/frames. (right): Axonometric of Loo’s Muller House (Prague, 1929-30), illustrating the multiple planes/frames within the interior; a theatre within the house.

Adolf Loos states that his architecture is not conceived in plan, but rather in terms of spaces or cubes, hence the Raum – or Space – plan, which achieves a merging of storeys and spaces into a contiguous and continuous space.

“Spatial continuity between rooms was created not by omitting walls but by piercing them with wide openings so that views were always framed…

Often the connection between rooms was only visual, as through a proscenium. At their interface, these spaces had a theatrical quality” (Colquhoun, 2002).

As such, the viewer is allowed to ‘journey’ through the space creating a spatial continuum of the layered planes-spaces. This reiterates the notion of transparency as a seeing- or passing-through, that is, a journey, a penetration, or a passing through of the gaze.

Both the plan and section of the Muller House depict a diagonal arrow; this denotes the perspectival view in/out. The diagonality is important, as the arrows in both the plan and section refer to the same view, that is, both arrows are in effect the same, as they both denote the same sequence of framed vistas. The subject in the building engages in a theatrical voyeuristic gaze passing through the framed spaces. The Raumplan demonstrates a framing of frames, a seeing or penetrating through the successive frames of view. Hence, phenomenal or conceptual transparency is achieved, following what Rowe and Slutzky mentioned with regards to the notion of stratification, that is, the sequential layering of frontal planes and spaces.

Muller House Perspective

Spatial/Circulation Diagram

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