Author's Forum: The Venetian

Вот отформатированный транскрипт вебинара: Роб Стадервилл: Okay, we're going to get started. Welcome to On the Park Bench, a public square conversation brought to you by the Congress for the New Urbanism. On the Park Bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and fields related to the built environment. Today we have an author's forum on the Venetian facade with author Michael Dennis, and the interviewer is Richard Economakis. So, share your thoughts on On the Park Bench: www.tinyurl.com/otpbfeedback. And I'm looking forward to the conversation today. Michael Dennis is an architect with Michael Dennis Associates. He's been an academic and practicing architect for over 40 years in Boston, and prior to that, in Ithaca, New York. He is a Professor Emeritus of Architecture at MIT. He is the author of numerous books, including "Architecture in the City, Selected Essays," published in 2020, and now "The Venetian Facade." Richard Economakis is Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Notre Dame. He combines teaching with his own private practice and a growing portfolio of built projects. Professor Economakis has edited numerous books on classical architecture and urbanism. Today we focus on Michael's book, "The Venetian Facade," and the role of the facade in architecture and urbanism. I'm Rob Studerville, editor of CNU's Public Square. First, there's going to be a presentation, then a discussion between Michael and Richard, and then Q&A from the audience. So please use the Q&A function of Zoom to ask your questions as they occur to you. So, welcome, Michael and Richard, to On the Park Bench. I'm going to pass this along to Michael for a presentation. Роб Стадервилл: Here. Okay, is that… you need to do full screen. Yeah, there you go. Okay. Майкл Деннис: Thanks, Rob. It's great to be with you guys and everybody else today, about this book. I know I look like James Carville, but I'm wearing this beanie because I want to give credit to Notre Dame School of Architecture today at the beginning. Because this book is the first book in a new series that Notre Dame publishers called "Ratio et Architectura." I think it's… if I were to describe the series, it may not be correct. Stephanos, as always, may correct me, but I think it's a series that Notre Dame Architecture feels is important, but also a series that might be difficult to get done, to get published otherwise. Everybody knows that people don't read much these days, and especially architects, so that's the purpose of the thing. Can I take my Carville hat off, my Notre Dame hat off? Because I can see better. The cover is… the cover is intentionally, those of you that know Venice know these buildings are not together with each other. But the cover was done to kind of provoke a discussion about Classicism and the Venetian tradition. I'm of the opinion that classicism is a quite odd seeing in Venice, but we'll say more about that later on. You might also wonder, why would anybody do this? There are hundreds of books about Venice. Why would you also write about Venetian facades only? You wouldn't be the only one. We tried out for our office, interviewed for a project in Georgia a number of years ago. The next day, the university architect called me and said that we had gotten the commission, but he said, "I have to tell you, it wasn't unanimous. One of the trustees said he just couldn't understand how a grown man could sit around worrying about what buildings look like." And that's the, I think, kind of an appropriate thing nowadays, given the state of architecture. But to me, the Venetian facade is… it's like a nested series of Russian dolls. It's a thing within a thing within a thing, and is germane because we need them more than ever. We need cities more than ever. And they're… I think they're possibly precedents for modern facades as well as classical ones. So the word "facade" basically means "face." It descends from the Latin "facia," to the Italian "faccia," and "facciata," and finally to the French "façade." The word has two basic meanings, which Webster defines as: "the front of a building, also any face of a building given special architectural treatment," and two, "a false, superficial, or artificial appearance or effect." And that one is what has plagued the business of facades for a long time. I looked up CNU's lexicon to see what there was, and I didn't find anything about facades. I found in the lexicon this series of ideas about streets, urban and other kinds of streets, but nothing about facades. And this is Bordeaux, France. This is Bordeaux on the left side. This is Seaside on the right side. We can quibble about whether these are facades or not. Possibly they are. But it's for a village, for a town. It's not for a real city, not for an urban city with street walls and so on. This is Bordeaux with a bastide town, a village on the other side, collaged in on the other side, so that even in France and in Italy and most of Europe, even small towns have facades that align on the street. In order to suggest a word about urbanism, two conditions I think are required to be urban, to be city, urban. One is buildings that align on the street or square that are close enough to define space, and two, walkable, multifunctional layers. It's not about density per se. This is, of course, a street in Mexico, a small town in Mexico. And this is back to Bordeaux again, where the buildings define the space of the square, and they're random in heights and slightly random in language and so on. It's not a kind of highly unified square, but it's a defined space nevertheless, and a great variety of buildings. And that's a fundamental question. So, back to Venice. Venice is mesmerizing. It's… it confounds architects that go there when they come from the stone cities of Florence and Milano and Rome and so on, because it's very, very different, and it's hard to understand. If you contrast the Doge's Palace on the right with Palazzo Medici Riccardi on the left in Florence, you see the difference. They're almost the reverse of each other. This is like a fortress. Venice is open, it's transparent on the bottom, and most of the buildings are transparent. There's a reason for that. And that is that when the barbarians came in around the mountains and down in Italy, the natives from towns like Altino and Este and Treviso all ran out to the islands in the lagoon. And after the bad guys had passed, they went back to their cities again. Except for Attila the Hun – he burned everything in his path. And except for the Lombards, which is where Lombardia comes from – they came to stay. And so people began to settle in the lagoon, which looks kind of like this still today in part of it. And they settled on islands. These were like neighborhoods, and gradually they grew together, and bridges were built until it became the city that we know today. Also, Venice for 1100 years was safe. Even Napoleon's cannons couldn't reach Venice from the mainland. Oh, sorry. Back. Couldn't reach Venice from the mainland. And the Venetians had a fortress right at the mouth of San Nicolò di Lido. This is the barrier islands. So they could blow up any ship that came through here. And the ships also, even if they escaped, they couldn't maneuver because only the Venetians knew where these canals were. So they would come through and get stuck in one of the canals, or get stuck in one of the sandbars. So that safety was a really important thing. Those initial things were… those initial islands were generally marked by a campo (they don't call them piazzas), but a campo with a church and a well and a perimeter that now you don't see because they're all blended together. So you needed three things to sustain life out there: you needed food, security, and water, because the water was brackish. They had security, which we just talked about. They had plenty of fish and birds to eat. And they devised a system of wells to collect water and freshwater and sustained life. So that enabled them in the long run to have two systems of communication, circulation: one, the canals, and two, the terra firma, the land routes. And that produced what you would normally call a civic structure, which is the sequence of the Grand Canal from now, beyond San Marco, around the Grand Canal to the train station on this end today, past the Rialto Bridge here, with these major circulation areas. In most cities, you can sit down and draw the civic structure of the city without much problem. In Venice, it's impossible to do, and it confuses everybody that goes there. So you have to look at it in a different way. You have to look at the DNA, the Venetian building, the Venetian palace, as the core element of the DNA. The classic one is three bays wide, with a long center bay in the center, and two outside bays that usually have a blank panel between the windows, which is abnormal for the rest of like townhouses and things. Since they were open, they could have this long portico all the way in the middle, open at both ends. And there were two, I think, architectural phenomena that are important. One is the fabric of the facade, even though you don't see it. It's like a grid related to the human body, and that, of course, is Leonardo's universal man. And the other is figurative elements that appear out of that grid or sometimes in lieu of it. So here are the two bays, and this is going to be quick. This one is open, and this one has the windows out to the outside and the blank panel in the center. This is manufactured now. Richard, don't yell at me, but this is due to Mr. Photoshop. You can have one bay if you have a certain amount of money. You can have two bays, two side bays, if you have a little bit more money. You can also put two bays together with a slice down the middle. You can also have an asymmetrical version with a side bay and a center bay. Or you can edit the whole thing. What you never have, except one time in Venice – there's only one of these in Venice, and I'm not going to tell you where it is – there's only one that has the center bay as the whole building. So, to make a little sidebar comment about classicism. This is Ospedale. It was originally the Scuola di San Marco. The bottom was done by Pietro Lombardo, the top by Mauro Codussi, who's a terrific, terrific classical architect, introduced it into Venice. And I've been by this building hundreds of times, I suppose. And I never… it seemed it's beautiful, but it always seemed a bit odd to me. And so one day I started wondering what would happen if you completed the building as if Pietro Lombardo had done it. So I made this collage of what I thought he might have done. He did this for a church nearby. And there are no pediments on the windows. There are more walled surface, et cetera. And you this arch and this arch and this entry arch that make a kind of first perspective or a kind of phenomenal perspective like the ones down below, which complete themselves phenomenally behind the facade. I'm a little bit godless to think that this is maybe just a little bit better. I wish Pietro had done it himself. The problem, one of the problems, is that classical buildings on water with representations of structure being carried down to the ground, I think, are a bit of a problem. This is a beautiful facade. Werner Seligmann used to go crazy about this facade. It has beautiful layers. It has almost no wall surface. You can see a little bit down here. But other than that, it's a highly plastic wall. The Venetian facade, this is the Ca' d'Oro on the left-hand side. It's about 1450. It looks like it's hung from the cornice like a tapestry. And if you look here, none of these columns actually align down through the facade, so there's no real sense of loads being carried to the ground. It's like a pure surface. You can't even imagine how these loads are carried to the ground. So we'll say more about that later. It also has balconies, which very few Italian buildings have. And here again is an example of the fabric of the facade that sort of… a field within which the figures emerge or force the pattern of the field. This being the kind of primary figure, and there's Leonardo again. And I can't see this because you guys are on the right side of the screen, but this is the second center. There's one center about this, there's another center about this. And then finally, in the diagram, there's a center in the middle because that balcony, these balconies and these windows are in the middle of the facade, which tends to restabilize it, restabilize the asymmetry. This window and this window and this window are the same, which emphasizes that this one is different. These all four at the top are all the same. So there's a lot of things going on in the facade. There's a set of proportional relationships. This figure here has the same proportional relationship as the overall facade. And years ago at Cornell, I asked the students to do collages of this and to do painting that picked up the principles of the thing. This is one of them. I think it's amazingly inventive and has all of the characteristics of the overlapping fields that the actual facade has. So this began, sorry to jump this around, this begins a series of those bay types: a single bay, this one happens to have two windows on the side and the diagrams. This one is two bays, two side bays put together. It's quite beautiful. It has a kind of spot up here that dominates the others. You notice that right here, there's a gap between the balconies and no gap on the top, which gives privilege to this one over this one, as well as the one difference in the windows. The famous one, the Contarini, which has a center bay and a side bay, and the side bay is bigger, but its window joins together with the center bay to make a kind of asymmetrical reading. And this becomes then the center of the whole facade, with lots of freckles, lots of cross sections through columns. And a three-bay facade near the Accademia. If you look at the center portion, which also borrows these windows, here's the line between the center bay and the side bays, but these windows appear to belong to the center bay more than the side. And there's a phenomenal amount of glass in terms of, you know, modern buildings being made of glass. There's a huge percentage of the facade is actually glass. There's a wonderful one pair of buildings on the Grand Canal, the Palazzo Giustiniani, that are joined. There's a canal behind this zone right here in the middle of the whole thing. And if you look closely at this thing in the book, there are all kinds of other things going on, and that are depicted overlapping readings. Sorry. And if you want to add on to a building and not have a whole building, you can either add a side bay. Here's one side bay, and it's extended by putting a center bay on the edge. Sometimes this is an independent building, sometimes they overlap. There are a number of these, and they're quite amazing. And this is to represent the idea that that kind of mesmerizing quality that Venice has, and yet it has both unity and variety. There's a case that was made in the 70s by the Rationalist types that you had two kinds of things in cities, urban conditions: you had urban fabric, which was background stuff, and urban monuments, which are the high art buildings of monuments. But so the question is, can you have a city where architecture is active and high art at every level and still have the unity of fabric and the continuity of the city? I think Venice demonstrates that you can have that, because there are modest buildings in Venice that are quite amazing, actually. They're not so much… they are background buildings, but they're also beautiful works of architecture. So here's a piece of the Grand Canal. The Mocenigo Palace is this one, is the old one. This is the new one. And these are new. And there's quite a variety. Even these two in the center don't… it's one family, of course. These two in the center are not exactly the same. And down below is a scene from Amsterdam, one of the canals in the Jordaan, where you get an amazing variety within a system. It's phenomenal that in Venice for 700 years, architects used the same typology, the same side bay and the same center bay, but with different styles, different languages, etc. Today, you probably couldn't get architects to do seven months worth of similar typologies, much less 700 years worth, maybe not even seven days. Got to be new. There's Allan Shulman's photograph of Ithaca, New York, which is, I think, kind of fabulous. And then Boylston Street in Boston. You know, this picture is in "Temples and Towns," and it has Palladio's Casa Cogolo collaged into it. Not one of my friends has commented on this yet, which surprised me, which demonstrates that maybe they didn't look closely at the book. Obviously, one of the big problems is the point load frame. This one is Le Corbusier's 1914 Domino frame. This is Mies's Barcelona Pavilion. Basically, it made it unnecessary to have a facade. On the other hand, traditionally, you didn't need a facade either. That's the base of the Casa Cogolo. It's all the… architecture is applied to that load-bearing wall surface. And it's fabulous. Le Corbusier did the Villa Schwob in Switzerland and the Maison Planeix in Paris. Even though he used the columnar frame, the Domino frame, he insisted on buildings having facades as well. This one is like the Doge's Palace upside down. I mean, like the Doge's Palace, where it's a Florentine palace upside down, where the dense part is on the top, and it's quite open on the bottom. This is one of my favorites. It's a building in Brussels by Antoine Pompe. It's been much changed. It's not so nice today. But you see it's got all those funky things that matter, things where this pilaster doesn't go all the way down, it comes over the doors. But it's a framed building, and I think you would consider it to be a facade. You need facades to have good cities. You don't need things like this. At least my mentor, Lee Hodgden, used to say, "Oh, my God, these architects, they're like two-year-olds. They crap on the floor and then say, 'Mommy, mommy, look what I made!'" It doesn't make cities. And here's Dubai, as it was before it was, let's say, completed. And this is just to tick off Richard to Donnie. There it is as it's built out. It may be a city according to population, but it's not a city in terms of urbanity. And so I've gone over a little bit here. But Richard, have it. Роб Стадервилл: Yeah, sure. Just wanted to remind everybody to ask questions in the Q&A function in Zoom, and we'll get to those. Yeah, not too long. Right. Ричард Экономакис: Well… Thank you very much, Michael, for this presentation. I've read your book, and I can say that it does an amazing job laying out the typology of the Venetian facade, and also putting it in context for us today, so that we can actually appreciate its relevance. Especially the analytical images and diagrams are extremely helpful in outlining the strategies that were employed, the typological strategies by Venetian architects and builders, and also there's just the range of compositions they achieved applying these strategies. I just wanted to recapitulate some of the points you make in the book, which you haven't had time to go over all of them. So some may repeat what you've already told us. But as you explained in your presentation, the basic units of the Venetian facade are the central portico bay, and then the side bay with a blank central panel and flanking windows. You noted that, as in other pre-modern cities, the facade in Venice was essential in the making of the urban fabric, and it was a dignified interface between the public and private realms. You also explain in your book, and I'll quote from your book, that the Venetian facade is a, quote, "plainer, centralized planner," or "it is plain or centralized and has no structural indication of loads being carried to the ground." In your book, you call it a "free facade," and you compare it, as you just did, to an oriental tapestry hanging from the cornice, as opposed to being supported from below, which is fascinating. And this, of course, as you said, is in contrast to again, what you call in your book, what you describe as the, quote, "gridded plasticity and lateral emphasis of classical facades," which are about loads being carried to the ground by columns or walls. In your book, you also note that there are, in your opinion, three facade types generally: there's the mask, the mediator, and the membrane. The mask being exemplified by Renaissance and Baroque facades, and this has more allegiance to the public rather than the private realm, you know, thinking of the Palazzo Medici that you showed us, for example. It defines streets and squares. There's the mediator, you explain that it's typified by the Venetian palace facades, which are more open and reflective of the private realm, which is fascinating. And so there's more of an intimate relationship between inside and out, as you say. And then finally, and this is, I think, the point I was trying to get to, is that you describe something called the "membrane," which you're talking about in the book, you're talking about Le Corbusier's Domino frame with the floor slabs and pilotis that make the facade unnecessary. So that if an architect chooses to give a Domino frame building a facade, it's typically pinned to the slabs and doesn't rely on load-bearing walls or columns. So this last facade is the evolutionary descendant of the 19th-century point load structural frame, which in your book you note was hailed as an expression of truth, though originally it was embedded in masonry as if to say, "Beauty trumps truth." You also note that in your book that Le Corbusier was alone among modernists in insisting on facades for his urban buildings; he owes a great debt to Venice with regard to compositional strategies. So I do have some questions now, and the first one I'd like to throw your way is: you describe in your book two strains of modernism. One grows out of Paris and Cubism, promoting compositions of frontal, layered space, which is Le Corbusier's modernism, let's say, which is capable of urbanism. And then there's the other strain, which grows out of Dutch De Stijl, German Rationalism, and Russian Constructivism, as you explain. And it promoted diagonal space and isolated anti-urban buildings. You explained that this last German, Dutch, Russian strain is the more simplistic one, and it prevailed. So my question to you is, why did that prevail, and as a corollary, why did Le Corbusier himself at a certain point stop designing buildings that were embedded in the fabric of the traditional city? Майкл Деннис: Huh, well, this is… this could be a long rabbit, a deep rabbit hole here, but in the interest of time, let's try and abbreviate it. I think, I mean, it's a phenomenal thing that modern architecture in general was anti-urban. Modernist architecture, early Corbusier, and that idea of a more complex view of things and shallow layered space was perfect for cities that were urban. That is to say that had buildings that looked like this, that lined the space and defined the space. It's not possible to do that with Theo van Doesburg's buildings or Hannes Meyer's buildings or any of those other strains of modernism. In fact, there's a… since about 1850 or 1860, when neoclassicism turned architecture inside out and made the detached pavilion the kind of modus operandi, it's been very difficult for architecture to recover from that. And it's possible to see that strain of modernism as a kind of… the bastard child of neoclassicism and the École des Beaux-Arts down to the 20th century. I don't know what was going on in Corbusier's mind, but he was… Colin Rowe used to make a big point that he was the architect. Le Corbusier was quite different from the city planner, Le Corbusier, which is true. And as soon as he… when he did the Salvation Army building in Paris, it's a fragment that's meant to be a piece of a bigger composition of one of the *immeubles-villas* buildings. But it's nestled into the fabric. And he complained about the regulations, the urban design regulations, the height of the building and so on. But thank God for that, because it forced it to be nestled into the fabric of the city. The minute he was able to get free of that and pursue this *Plan Voisin* idea, the *immeubles-villas* idea, he started doing freestanding buildings. In the beginning, there were the *immeubles-villas*, but they never kind of caught on. It became detached buildings and detached… no. So you can't just rule out modernism as anti-urban, because not all of it was. Some of it was, most of it was, and today it's almost all anti-urban. If you pick up the magazines or look at the magazines today, you very rarely find an urban building, but they're all, even in cities, they're all detached buildings. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: And the computer has exacerbated that. Brian Eric Thorglason said the computer makes it possible for architects to do what the bad students always wanted to do but couldn't because they couldn't find a way to make it. So whether that can be reversed or not, I don't know, but I think it's good to look back at more complex views of architecture, modernist architecture, as well as classicism, for how to make urban buildings, urban architecture. Ричард Экономакис: Right. I think it's fascinating. You know, you talk about how modernism can be seen as an evolutionary, say, child of neoclassical… the neoclassical fascination with the object building, you know, the object in the park. And what's really interesting as well, if you think about it, that's very much the case if you think about how architecture developed in Northern Europe and elsewhere. But there were moments when that architecture of isolated objects was adapted to an urbanism. For instance, the neoclassicism of Greece in the 19th century with all these German and Northern European architects bringing neoclassicism to the newly established modern Greek state. But cobbling together out of those forms that they were applying to object buildings, they were essentially creating a very dense urban kind of architecture using the same expressions. And I don't know whether you want to comment on that, but so it's fascinating to consider. Майкл Деннис: Well, yeah, you know, I think we talked about this one time. One of the things that has nagged me for a long time, I mean, I'm a… I'm a friend of classicism, although I've never done a classical building myself. But it's haunted by, especially in our time, by the fact that it began as temples, it began as detached buildings. And then the Romans took those Greek models and made them to some degree urbanistically biodegradable. They made buildings that were not temples but had the orders superimposed on them. And the things you're talking about are buildings, classical buildings, that have been civilized to be… they've been made urban and civilized to be urbane, to make cities. And it's not that they have to be, but unfortunately, today, most classical buildings are what someone called "trust fund villas," you know, trust fund country houses. Okay. Big money building these things. And they're beautiful, but they're beautiful. They don't make cities. There are very few classical buildings today that are simply members of the community in expanding the fabric of the city. Some, but not many. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: And I think that's an unexamined, unexplored area, which, by the way, the early late 19th and early 20th century American architects knew how to do damn well. I mean, they made townhouses that were amazingly beautiful. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: They also made monumental buildings like the New York Public Library that sat in the city. They had entourage around them that glued them into the… connected them into the city in a fantastic way. All of that knowledge base, though, went away. And to me, that's the… that's the… what would you say? That's one of the appealing things about the classical language of architecture, it deals with, and the École des Beaux-Arts, it deals with the knowledge base which has largely disappeared today. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: I mean, if you ask most architects today, even classical architects, "Who was Henry Hornbostel?" they don't have a clue. No idea who it was. If you ask a student, "Who was Werner Jansen?" they might think it was a French movie actor or something. No one will know. Ричард Экономакис: Yeah. Майкл Деннис: And that's a shame. They were amazingly well educated. Ричард Экономакис: Yeah. Майкл Деннис: They could design all kinds of things. And that period was a period when those highly trained architects absorbed all the modern stuff, they absorbed the frame building. Ричард Экономакис: Yeah. Майкл Деннис: It was simply taken in like the skeleton of your body, you know. They absorbed high-rise buildings that could still make cities, New York in the 1930s, for example. And they could do really complex programs, multifunctional programs. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: All that dried up with the Second World War or by the Second World War. Ричард Экономакис: Yeah. Майкл Деннис: Hello. Cheapness and manufacturing had a great deal to do with it, mass production. Ричард Экономакис: Mm-hmm. Майкл Деннис: But it was also ideological. Ричард Экономакис: Well, now, Michael, this raises another question I wanted to ask you, and that… going back to your presentation, you noted that regarding the distinction between background and foreground buildings, you know, fabric and monumental buildings, you argue that Venice proves that fabric buildings can be beautiful as well. So my question to you is, wouldn't you say that all pre-modern buildings are innately beautiful in their honest, straightforward use of materials and craftsmanship? So perhaps you can expand a little bit on that point. Майкл Деннис: Well, yeah, they are. Some are boring as hell, you know, you have to admit. You go to… I can't think of the name of the town now, the Italian town, it's an ideal town. It's what we used to call a two-hour town, you know, maybe it's even an hour and a half town. Once you've understood how the buildings relate to the plan, you want to go on and see something else because the buildings are prosaic. They're not like the thing about the Venetian buildings is that they aren't… the simplest ones, like the side bay ones with the windows on the outside edge, with the most minimal means become kind of… they take on a personality and a character. But it is possible to strip everything away from buildings and they become boring. They're still not… they're not evil. They don't destroy the city. But they don't contribute that… contribute kind of electricity, that vitality to the city that you can go back to time and time again. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Yeah. Майкл Деннис: And it doesn't have to be Venice. It can be small towns in Italy and France, France especially. Ричард Экономакис: Yeah, you mentioned the typological kind of thread that ties all buildings together in Venice. The only place I can think of in the United States where there's that kind of typological unity is perhaps Charleston, where the, you know, the type is seen at all scales and across all, you know, economic, socioeconomic groups. Майкл Деннис: Yeah, well, that's true. Yeah. It's really, yeah. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: I mean, Charleston and Savannah, there are lots of really beautiful American towns. It's hard to call them cities because they're… my… population and they're not urban cities. But they're quite beautiful. Seaside is a beautiful place, but it's not a city. It's a beachfront town, a classic American town of detached buildings. Each one has its own character. And that you can trace the lineage directly back to the late 18th century where architecture began to take on the character of the owner. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: Ledoux did that one building on the corner for that you enter on the diagonal, and one wing is for the man and one wing is for the woman because they were both nobility, they had a noble history. Maison Guimard was another example where they tried to capitalize on the character of the owner and make the buildings unique. Seaside has that. But if you have more density and more urbanity, that doesn't work anymore. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: It's like that Dubai thing with tons of detached buildings. Ричард Экономакис: Michael, I'm conscious of time, and I don't want to deny our… deny listeners the opportunity to pose their own questions. I did have one more, but we can maybe cycle back to that if time permits, but maybe I can… Майкл Деннис: Say it, tell me, and we'll see how long it is. Ричард Экономакис: Well, I was just, I mean, it's my last question is, you know, what you think, besides what you've told us, you know, what additional lessons do the facades of Venice… what can we learn from them today? How can we apply them? And what's stopping us from embracing this notion, especially in a world where frame construction rules, you know, learning from Venice with its facades that are sort of lightly perched on the faces of buildings, perhaps there's something to be learned there, and how do we apply that? That's my question. We can maybe go back to that. Майкл Деннис: Yeah. Okay. But perhaps we can, yeah. Ричард Экономакис: Yeah, let's do that. Роб Стадервилл: Rob. Sure. I can read, I have in front of me, the question, the Q&A questions. I can maybe start at the top and we see how many we can get through. Yep. So the first one… somebody here, or I think it's Ken Hughes, says that he notes construction cranes at work in Venice. Well, he noted construction cranes while he was there in September. His question is, are there new buildings, or are new buildings honoring the facade? Майкл Деннис: Look. No. No, the simple answer is no. There are some modern buildings. Well, there are one or two modernist buildings. There are one or two in Venice proper, but they're mainly on the Giudecca. There are these housing projects. One, for example, there's one housing project out on the end of the Cannaregio Canal, where my favorite restaurant used to be. It's gone now with the pandemic. And it hasn't hurt anyone, but it's not great shakes, because they basically don't have facades. Sometimes they make walls, but they… the ones on the Giudecca, and you can argue about this, I have friends that would argue about it, I don't like them. I don't think they're very good. They're very good housing projects, that where you design too much, where one architect designs too much. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: So I don't know if… yeah, great examples where they've all at the same typologies and in a good way. Ричард Экономакис: Right. The next question is somewhat related. Jake Baker is asking if, since all the materials had to be brought in from outside the lagoon, not just for buildings, but also the shipbuilding industry, there were presumably large industrial areas. And did those receive the same treatment? In other words, if we look beyond the residential types, did some of the other building types beyond the civic and residential use a similar sort of light, facade mediator type facade? Майкл Деннис: Well, there's… there aren't really any areas like that, like as imagined in the question. There's the Arsenale, where they built the ships, and that's… you can't go into that place still today because it's part of the Italian military thing. That was an isolated thing. And the people that worked in the shipyards of the Arsenale lived nearby. And, you know, it's quite amazing, they built… when they were really going at it as a power in the Mediterranean, they could turn out one ship a day. They had it organized to such a degree that they could build one ship a day. The building of the gondolas, which is also fascinating, was done in a way, it was a local thing. There are these two or three, I think, still exist, but they're quite… they were and are quite small. And yes, they had to bring everything in. I mean, there's food, stone… the white stone is from Istria, which is across the Adriatic. This is a great act of will to build on the water and import all of these things, the bricks and the… and the Eastern stone, the wood. They basically cut down on the terra firma, the land portion of Italy beyond Venice. Cut down the trees back for miles to build the ships. And they had to get all of those things milled and were brought to Venice and milled, which presumably happened in the Arsenale. So it's a miracle that the thing exists. You do not find huge industrial areas in Venice like you would find today outside of Italian cities. Ричард Экономакис: Right, right. Okay, well… Роб Стадервилл: Thanks, we can maybe… there are a couple more, well, maybe three more questions I see here in front of me. I can maybe read one. The next one is from Will. We'll see. "Do the compositions of Venetian facades or the typologies of their buildings, which are not directly on the Grand Canal, differ significantly in their organization from those that are? Does the role of procession down the canal particularly influence facades in a way that it does not on other secondary canals and squares?" Майкл Деннис: Well, that's two questions, actually. One of them is that the facades away from the Grand Canal are equally interesting in general as those on the Grand Canal. And there's a fabulous book by Egle Trincanato. She was a woman who published this book called "Venezia Minore," "Minor Venice." It's about the sestieri, two of the neighborhoods in Venice, that where she draws and illustrates a lot of Venetian apartment buildings that I should have put one of those in, which are based on the same principles and the same typologies as the ones that I've shown. For example, if you look here on the right-hand side at the Ca' d'Oro, and imagine that the building is four stories high, one apartment would be on two floors, the piano nobile, the first floor above ground, then the floor below. And the other apartment would be on the third floor and the fourth floor. Simply mirror image and then mirror image, right to left. And sometimes more modest than that. Venice had rental housing going back to the, I think it was the 13th century or 14th century. And some of that, excuse me, some of those still exist in Venice. That's a marvelous book, Trincanato's "Venezia Minore." They also, some of them have balconies. The great thing about the balcony… well, the other place that has balconies, usually as a basic part of the facade, is Paris. And that's the place where you get that mediation zone between the inside and the outside. It's like the bay windows in Boston or Philadelphia, where you can stand and be simultaneously part of the public realm on the outside and the private room on the inside. And of course, along the Grand Canal… Роб Стадервилл: Thank you. Майкл Деннис: It's still basically a spectacle every day, but when they had, you know, parades and things down the Grand Canal, that was a fantastic way to see them. And it kind of… it's like public life on steroids. No. And it's interesting that Corbusier used balconies also. If you look at most of those early buildings, 1920s buildings, they mostly had… most all of them had balconies. Роб Стадервилл: Okay, thank you. Майкл Деннис: And they weren't just figurative things. They make another component which helps, if you look at the book. You know, you can't go into all this stuff, but they're an integral part of the window frames and the way the facade is organized and gridded. But they're also a social thing. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: They're not just an artistic thing. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: And that still exists in on the interiors of Venice. I mean, meaning not the interiors of buildings, but the interior areas, the neighborhoods of Venice. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: The *campo* life goes on still today in those places. No. My wife and I lived very near one a couple of years ago that had Tango Tuesdays. On Tuesday night, they had tango dancing in the *campo*. So there's an amazing connection between the inside and the outside. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Well, thanks, Michael. There's a question from Steve Sems. We have another three or four to read. Steve asks, can you… I lost it. "Can you comment on the uses of the interior rooms and the ways they are or are not represented in the facades?" Майкл Деннис: That's a… that's a tricky one that takes more, in a way, more time than we have. Obviously, the rooms… let me say that the first statement of good facades is that you need to have better abilities. You have to have party wall buildings. You don't have to have complete party wall buildings. In fact, if you look on the right-hand side again, if you look on the left-hand side, you get a bunch of party wall buildings, and then you've got a gap. If you look on the right-hand side, you see what looked to be continuous buildings, but… but like right here, in the Ca' d'Oro, and right here, and right here, and right here, and right here, they turn the corner. So there's a kind of zone. It's like a thick phenomenal zone for the facade. And when they're not party walled buildings, those interior rooms have… sometimes they have faces on the courtyards or onto this little side alleyway, like streets or pathways. And the more prominent ones, of course, are on the primary facade of the building. Secondary ones back in. Generally speaking, I didn't explain this, but on the ground floor there's… originally, it was the business, right? And it was the ground floor was for goods and services. And there was a mezzanine. There are frequently mezzanines on the main floor, and on the other floor, and especially in the roof, which is where the kitchens were and the servants' quarters and so on in the bigger palazzi. So there's a kind of basic logic to where rooms go. Then there's always almost always a courtyard in the back, and rooms sometimes face on that. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Роб Стадервилл: Wanted to mention that we are at the close to the top of the hour, and we can field a couple more questions, but I wanted to let everybody know that CNU will be posting this webinar on its website probably tomorrow. And so if you needed to go but wanted to go back and look at the additional discussion, you can go, you can check out the video that's posted on the CNU website. I also wanted to mention that you can purchase… you can find the link to purchase Michael's book in the chat. And I also forgot to mention earlier that I wanted to thank Duart to Donnie for organizing this webinar. And so that's always appreciated to bring these great discussions together. And with that, you can continue until we're done. Okay. Ричард Экономакис: Great. Роб Стадервилл: Thank you, Rob. Ричард Экономакис: Sure. We have, let's see, I'm looking at a couple of additional questions here in front of me. I'll read. The next one is from Karen Moreno. "Do you think there is an appropriate place in modern urbanism for fantasy-inspired buildings or street objects? And how might these designs contribute to the identity and experience of urban spaces?" Майкл Деннис: Well, I think, first of all, urban design today, we in America have a real issue with urban design and cities. It's… there are all kinds of reasons why we, for example, with one or two possible exceptions, we don't have great cities, because to have real cities, you have to live in them. And we have, instead of having city centers, we have downtowns, and then surrounded by, generally speaking, one-family houses. Even Boston. New York is the one, Manhattan Island is the one place where you don't find detached buildings, many detached buildings, certainly not residential ones. So there's a problem getting to the point of having cities. Fantasy objects, I'm… I don't know. I'm not sure what those are. If you go to Barcelona, there are these Ramblas streets that have fantastic sculptures in them that activate the thing, if you call those fantasies, I suppose. If you have a real city, then there's a possibility of that kind of activation. I don't think you can have a kind of Walt Disney version of a city, a fantasy version of the city. Venice is a genuine place. It's not a fantasy place. So you… I mean, if Walt Disney did one, you know, it would be someplace that you go and pretend, right? My three-and-a-half-year-old grandson says, "Grandpa, this is just pretend, it's not the real thing." So I don't know quite how to answer that. Ричард Экономакис: It's interesting you should say that. Just recently, Michael, you and I were talking, and I mentioned or I even showed you a picture of a house in Chicago, in the Gold Coast, that's literally a reproduction of the Palazzo Contarini Fasan that you publish, you have its elevation in the… in your book. So literal copies, perhaps you could think of those a little bit as fantasies. Is there not interesting? Майкл Деннис: No. Yeah, I mean, that's… that's just transposing a real one, copying a real one. Contarini Fasan is instantly recognizable, right? Because it's one bay wide and has the quoins and the bricks and all of the stuff. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: It kind of makes, I don't know, you sort of make your skin crawl a little bit that it's an exact replica. It's not a kind of a theme that's played out by a… Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: …an architect. Ричард Экономакис: Yeah, everything down to the rope moldings even at the corners. Yeah. All right. There's a question from Steve Hurt. I'll read it, and I hope I'm reading correctly here. "Your book is a great introduction to the importance of the relation of both building typology and facade typology. It's what I've called grade school to graduate school description. It seems that many student projects give a program and site in a city with a fabric of related qualities, but the student focuses on the single, missing the broader lessons. What to do, how to change that result to focus on these typologies so that the city trumps the building rather than the other way around? Thank you." You may wish to comment on that. Майкл Деннис: Can you read the question again? Ричард Экономакис: Well, I guess he's saying that… he's saying many student projects, students, I guess, presumably in their thesis projects, will take on a program in a site in a city with a fabric with a of related qualities. The student focuses on the single building, I suppose that's what he means. Yeah, missing the broader lessons. How do you get the, I guess, the student's attention on the larger context that deals with type and deals with things like the building typology itself and then elevational strategies? Майкл Деннис: Well, you know, I think, let me begin with the broadest thing. I know Steve well, and we've had lots of discussions about how you begin teaching architecture students. It used to be the theory was you begin with a… with a small building of whatever kind was your predilection, and then you gradually work up in scale. That was one model, and it was a kind of predominant model, is one that I supported for a long time. I think it would be fair to say that Steve has always believed that you start with the city, and that's relate architecture to that. I would agree with that. I think, and it's the same thing with classical architecture. If you are teaching classicism, you begin with the idea of a pavilion or a small building of some kind so that you understand the columns and all of that stuff. The biggest problem is that, and you and I had a conversation the other day about this, what we knew when we got out of school. You went to Cornell, I've taught at Cornell. I went to school in Texas with the Texas Rangers. I was really stupid when I got out of school. I was energized. I had had my religion converted, my architectural religion converted to modernism. I had to go to Europe to find out about cities. I think the loss of a knowledge base and the teaching of urbanism and the knowledge base of urbanism is a fundamental problem coming into what Steve, the question Steve was asking. And it's not just that you want a student to get an urban site and then look left and look right, look right and bring them, you know, crossbreed them across. That's… frankly, I don't like the idea of contextualism. I mean, I don't like the term contextualism, but that's another matter. But knowing how a building can be an assertive building but related to a bigger urban fabric is, I think, important. Ричард Экономакис: Mm-hmm. Майкл Деннис: Sometimes they need to assert themselves depending on the circumstance, and sometimes they need to blend in like you find in Charleston. Yeah. It doesn't mean that the building has to be dull. It can be really interesting and exciting, like the ones in Venice. But if you don't understand, if you look at these two images and you don't understand what the city's like, it's very difficult to design a building in one of these urban sites, I think. Ричард Экономакис: Michael, maybe an example of what Steve is referring to is the city of Bath. You know, we used to… where I used to take students there frequently and do projects there. And what's amazing about Bath and the… the, you know, the terrace house type, which is the granddaddy of our own townhouse here in the US, was its architecture. Its forms, its layout was determined by the depth, the necessary depth, essentially no more than two rooms so that you can get lighting and ventilation into the building. And so it had to go up four or five floors and as a single-family home, and keep to those two room depth just in order to… to maintain that kind of the… to keep the lighting and air. So it became a real, a practical type that then proliferated and it gave us the city of Bath. Майкл Деннис: Yeah. Yeah. Well, the city always came first, didn't it? I mean, in Georgian London, with these great crescents and squares, the urban… with George Dance and… and people like that. In a way, they didn't design much of the architecture at all. Ричард Экономакис: Yeah. Майкл Деннис: They designed the urban plan and… facade of the building, the section of the building. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: Basically, typologically out of the building, and then the contractor built the thing. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Майкл Деннис: There's that famous story of John Nash coming out and seeing the cornice six feet high instead of three feet high. And he says, "Well, well, it's okay. You know, it looks pretty good." And they weren't very ornate things. The English never had trouble with repetition. The number of the house often is painted on the columns out in front of the entry pavilion. So there's a… Ричард Экономакис: That's interesting. Yeah. Майкл Деннис: There's a bigger idea in those cases about structuring urban space, and that comes first, and then the buildings come second. That's way different than these… than the modernist project that, for example, you find on the Giudecca Island across from the main part of Venice. Ричард Экономакис: Right. Thinking about, you know, the American townhouse takes the British, the English terrace house, and it wants greater depth. It wants it to be a more luxurious home. And so that forces them to cut… to institute these sort of gaps between buildings so that you can actually get lighting from the side, which English terrace houses don't initially. Майкл Деннис: Right. That's really interesting. Well, in Barcelona, in Boston, for example, the townhouses in the Back Bay are usually three bays deep. Ричард Экономакис: Yeah. Майкл Деннис: Which means the center room doesn't get direct light. And you can't call it a bedroom, it's always a workroom or something. People… landlords sell them as or rent them as bedrooms, and they're horrible when you don't have light. In Barcelona, there are sometimes five bays deep, because they had big families. And there's a courtyard in the middle, which the middle rooms face into the courtyard. Not a kind of Roman courtyard, just kind of a nasty courtyard, but light and air nevertheless. But in Boston, like Back Bay, the buildings, even though they're three bays deep, they make continuity along the street, and they have a great variety of… Роб Стадервилл: Thank you. Майкл Деннис: …besides bay windows, different all kinds of different bay windows. Sometimes there's… there's one of them. Sometimes there are two or three that were built at the same time, so they have a relationship. But it's always in the context of urbanism, context of the city, that the city space is the most important thing. Ричард Экономакис: Right. And… Роб Стадервилл: I wanted to thank you guys. We should probably wrap it up. Yeah. But thank you very much, Michael. And this has been fascinating. And Richard, it's been a really great discussion, and I wanted to thank all the participants and you everybody again for On the Park Bench. Next time. Thank you. Майкл Деннис: Thank you. Роб Стадервилл: Thanks to Notre Dame for the support. Bye. Good afternoon. Майкл Деннис: Thank you.