Sophia Psarra

From cosmic particles to gold-leaf tarot cards, Calvino’s fictions are variations on-a-theme, confronting literature, direct observation of the world and knowledge as kaleidoscopic games of narrative possibility. In Invisible Cities the theme of variations takes the form of microtexts grouped into an overarching text, a prose poem for cities that recounts how Marco Polo, the Venetian traveller, describes to Kublai Khan, the emperor of Mongolia, the cities of the great Khan’s empire. Kublai soon realises that every time Polo describes a city he says something about Venice and that all cities are merely variations, achieved by an interchange of elements from Polo’s native city. Calvino described Invisible Cities as a ‘space’ into which the reader must enter, roam around, and even lose direction, implying that the open-ended structure of the book exemplifies a city’s spatial network. Since most cities are built as spatial networks, what role does actually Venice play in this fiction? Is Venice a loose metaphor for Calvino’s multi-faceted text, or does it bear wider significance for his literature? Through an analysis of Venice’s history and geography and an analysis of Calvino’s fiction, this paper describes Venice and Invisible Cities as systems that resemble a probabilistic algorithm, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of spatial and narrative variations. It argues that from islands and building blocks to official histories and fables, Venice for Calvino is not simply an archetype for the literary imagination, but also a multitude of recombinant elements, capturing its spatial, social and mythical legacy. Taking inspiration from Polo’s travels in Il Milione and other canonical texts, Calvino, found in Venice a combinatorial universe of artisanal craftmanship, like an ancient artifact of epic or myth, where the theme of multiplicity develops its variations.

My contribution to the Studio Report 'Architecture, Curation, Perception' by Peponis et al forms a postscript to my book 'Architecture and Narrative', which was published in 2009 by Routledge. In this book I explore the spatial construction of meaning. In this text I argue that the construction of meaning in architecture takes place not only through spatial but also discursive means. In this way, architecture has both an analogical and interactive relationship with language. The analogical relationship between the two media is through the syntax of space. The interactive relationship is based on the classifying capacities of buildings to organise class memberships of social groups and functions, operating in a similar way to classes in language.

Space syntax is a significant theory / tool, describing buildings and cities as evolutionary processes and offering valuable support to architectural and urban design. However, theory and analytical research are different from the processes that characterise the generation of ideas in design practice. This chapter elaborates first, on the differences and intersections of analytical knowledge and intentional design; second, on some projects charged with integrating space syntax analysis in the studio. Considering design as a propositional field manipulating elements and relations through intuition and logical order, we argue that classification forms a crucial concept in design thinking, serving as a tool for design generation and invention. We propose a 'bisociative' approach as the intellectual synthesis of relations in two domains, the 'form-of-a-class' and the 'syntax-of-a-class'. The former refers to conceptual relations of similarity and difference in design, while the latter describes topological properties among elements of built space. Based on the membership of elements in the same or different domains, we identify two fundamental modes of design operation, the 'convergent' and 'divergent' modes. Bisociation can be used in the design studio to generate ideas while maintaining intellectual synthesis and rigour. 6.1 Introduction Doing architecture involves intuition, imagination and virtuosity. Equally important is engaging deeply with a design through intellectual thinking. When we do architecture, we deal with making and reflecting on what we make at the same time. How do we interface designing and reflecting, action and reasoning, evaluation and formulation? How do designs employ analytic understanding and design experimentation? Bill Hillier suggests that architects use quasi-theoretical ideas derived from a wide range of forms which are intuitively evaluated in the design process. He argues for an analytic theory, underpinning his proposition that architecture involves comparative theoretical knowledge about a wide range of configurations in the field of possibility, aiming at innovation rather than cultural reduplication (Hillier

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http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10047544/1/The-Venice-Variations.pdf


From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time.

Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ enduring a 1000 years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.