The Stones of VeniceRomanticism, Picturesque and the Garden Cities

Alberto Iacovoni, Marialuisa Palumbo | Cornell in Rome Fall 2016

1. The Industrial Revolution or the Machine Age

The muscles power

James Watt, steam engine, 1775

Women in pre-industrial home-based manifacturing

Women in early industrial textile manufacturing

The Bridgewater Foundry, Manchester, 1839

Women working in textile factory, 1912

Frederick Engels, The Housing Question, 1872

2. In between Classicism and Romanticism

Claude Perrault, French translation of Vitruvius, 1673

Claude Perrault, façade of the Palais du Louvre in Paris, 1667-70

Bernini, proposal for the competition held by Louis XIV for the design of the Louvre's façade

Marc Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l'architecture, 1753

Jacques-Germain Soufflot, Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, 1755-70

Jean-Baptiste Rondelet, Traité théorique et pratique de l'art de batir, 1802

Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Précis de lecons d'architecture donées à l'Ecole Polytechnique, 1802-05

Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Entretiens sur l'architecture, 1863-1872

Sir William Chambers, Architectural drawing for mausoleum for Frederick, Prince of Wales, 1751

Joseph Gandy, Sir Johan Soane's Bank of England as a ruin, 1830

Belvedere Court, Vatican Palace, begun 1504

Vatican Gardens, The Fountain of the Eagle or Fontana dello Scoglio

Villa Adriana, Tivoli

Villa d'Este, Tivoli, begun 1550

Villa Medici, begun 1564

William Kent, Garden at Stowe House, c.1730

William Kent, Garden at Stowe House, c.1730

William Kent, Garden at Rousham House, c.1730

Edmund Burke, 1756

William Gilpin, Observations Relative to Picturesque Beauty, 1789

John Nash, Regent's Park and Street, 1811

John Nash, Park Village East

3. The Stones of Venice

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1851

“We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”John Ruskin

John Ruskin and Le Cavalier Iller, Venice. The Ducal Palace, the Zecca and the Campanile, c.1851

“Understand this clearly: you can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.

....imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom,--a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom,--is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.” John Ruskin

Venice, St Mark's facade detail

Palazzo Gritti-Badoer, c.1852

The Grand Canal. The Casa d’Oro Under Restoration

The weaving shed in Morris & Co's factory, c.1880

William Morris, News From Nowhere, 1891

3. The Garden Cities

Ebnezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, 1902, third edition of Tomorrow: a peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898)

"I am always haunted by the awfulness of London: by the great appalling fact of these millions cast down, as it would appear by hazard, on the banks of this noble stream, working each in their own groove and their own cell, without regard or knowledge of each other, without heeding each other, without having the slightest idea how the other lives – the heedless casualty of unnumbered thousands of men." Lord Rosebery, speaking as Chairman of the London City Council, in Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow

“If they wanted a permanent remedy of the evil they must remove the cause; they must back the tide, and stop the migration of the people into the towns, and get the people back to the land.” Sir John Gorst, Daily Chronicle, 6th November 1891, in Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow

“We are becoming a land of great cities. Villages are stationary or receding; cities are enormously increasing. And if it be true that great cities tend more and more to become the graves of our race, can we wonder at it when we see the houses so foul, so squalid, so ill-drained, so vitiated by neglect and dirt?” Dean Farrar, in Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow

Norman Shaw, Bedford Park 1877

Norman Shaw, Bedford Park 1877

Letchworth Garden City, 1904

Letchworth Garden City, 1904

Letchworth Garden City, 1904

Letchworth town center

4. The Art of Place Making

"A city should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness" Aristotele, in Sitte

"it is only in our mathematical century that the construction and extension of cities has become a purely technical matter. (...) Those who have enough enthusiasm and faith in good causes should be convinced that our own era can create works of beauty and worth. We shall examine the plans of a number of cities. We wish to seek out, as technician and artist, the elements of composition which formerly produced such harmonious effects, and those which today produce only loose and dull results."Camillo Sitte, The Art of Building Cities

“...architectural elements of cities have greatly changed since antiquity. Public squares (Forum, market, etc.) are used in our times not so much for great popular festivals or for the daily needs of our life. The sole reason for their existence is to provide more air and light, and to breack the monotony of oceans of houses... it was quite different in ancient times. Public squares, or plazas, were then of prime necessity, for they were theatres for the principal scenes of public life, which today take places in enclosed hall. Under the open sky, on the agora, the council of the ancient Greeks gathered.”Camillo Sitte, The Art of Building Cities

The Art of Building Cities, 1889

Learning from the past. In the middle ages monuments were never placed in the center of the square, so to become sort of walls of squares.

The “perspective effect”: the idea of a pictoresque sequence as the basis for the design of public space.

Public space should be enclosed space and it should have the correct scale.Streets should be sinuous. The “personal and pedestrian experience” of the individual.

5. The garden suburb of Garbatella

Innocenzo Sabbatini, Albergo Rosso, 1927-29