In addition to being an aesthetic wonder, Venice is a architectural prodigythe result of a large construction site-laboratory which, over the centuries, has developed unprecedented construction strategies for building within the water of the lagoon, transforming constraints into opportunities. Building in Veniceby Mario Piana, analyzes and illustrates this operational intelligence, developed through progressive refinements and the accumulation of experiences, adjustments and remedies.
Accompanied by useful photographs and drawings (including by Piana himself), i nine chapters of the rich volume they reconstruct the solutions between the Middle Ages and the modern agefocusing on the «tempo novo» of the fifteenth century and the «renovatio urbis» of the sixteenth century, when the city changed its appearance by covering itself in Istrian stonechallenging the heights and embracing the classic language of the architecture of Codussi, Lombard, Sansovino And Palladium. Piana has investigated civil and religious buildings, sometimes illustrious: from the monumental buildings of Piazza San Marco to churches and palaces scattered throughout the city.
The experience in the field, gained in forty years of studies and restorations, has allowed him to explore, and then reveal, the construction measures of the different building parts, almost always hidden: wooden sub-foundation pilings driven into the marshy bottom, wall and load-bearing structures, floors, floors, coverings and finishes, roofs, domes and overdomes. But the great Venetian construction wisdom was expressed above all inuse of wood and in the myriad of variations and solutions capable of making the architecture light and flexible, without however sacrificing the magnificence of the Serenissima. City of wood or stone? Paraphrasing the great historian Braudelstudying Venice to understand it is the path proposed by the volume, which also reveals how the construction masteries are witnesses of the multicultural nature of the city, suspended between East and West and, ingeniously, between water and sky.
Building in Venice. The changes in lagoon building techniques between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age
by Mario Piana, 352 pp., 442 ill. col., Marsilio Arte with Palladio Museum and Save Venice, Venice 2023, €50
