ielements architecture kyle grasso venice ca

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. Digital technologies integrate designing with making, informational models of buildings with geographic information systems and digital mapping. Currently, buildings and cities are appropriated by digital technology and ubiquitous computing as a way of managing the city’s assets. 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. 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. This seems to confine us between a view of architecture as authored object and a view of the city as authorless socio-economic process. With Elements of Venice, this radical and thought-provoking book, Giulia demonstrates that Venice has been a city in perpetual transformation and, in the centuries of its splendour, at the forefront of modernity”.Īrchitecture is defined by intentional design, while cities are the product of multiple human actions over a long period of time. By looking through a microscope, Giulia demystifies the perception of Venice as a static entity providing (also visual) evidence of key moments of its metamorphosis while offering an interpretation of architectural elements as products of cultural and political shifts rather than just formal experimentation. The history of an entire city has never been analysed at the scale of architectural detail before, but this is what Giulia has done in the case of Venice: a city so rich in unique masterpieces that it seems futile to search for common patterns. Her focus on specific elements rather than individual architectures or architects exposes differences and contrasts in a sharper way than a typical global overview would yield. She has produced an entirely unprecedented work that turns out to be more profound than the traditional architectural historian’s comprehensive perspective. Giulia is presenting the results of that approach in this brilliant book. Because of her Venetian background, it seemed compelling to undertake an original experiment: to look at Venice, a very complex architectural and historical subject, through the lens of its smallest components. Giulia Foscari has been a crucial part of the team that organised Elements of Architecture. Our research uncovers not a single, unified history of architecture, but the multiple histories, origins, contaminations, similarities, and differences of these elements and how they evolved into their current iterations through technological advances, regulatory requirements, and new digital regimes. Elements of Architecture, an exhibition developed as part of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, presents micronarratives revealed by focusing systematically on the fundamentals of our buildings: the floor, the wall, the ceiling, the roof, the door, the window, the façade, the balcony, the corridor, the fireplace, the toilet, the stair, the escalator, the elevator, the ramp. “Architecture is both ancient and modern, each work an amalgamation of elements that have been around for over 5,000 years and others that were invented yesterday.

Ielements architecture kyle grasso venice ca