Building Around Architecture: Francesco Venezia Outside the Mainstream

Abstract

Italian architect, Francesco Venezia, is one of the most eminent figures in Italy today who understands the future and the past. His experiences in the city of Naples and its topography has led him consider the cultural connections of spolia, or what I call luxurious fragments, and the significance of how they serve humans living in the landscape. Venezia’s poetic imagination moves in the direction of an architecture that prizes the horizon, light, shadows, natural or artificial geometries and the residual - an architecture understood as creating links that move us and embody our soul. He believes that architects should work like tailors to create “harmonic attires” to highlight a building. As a result Venezia explains how future buildings should be “durable.” This includes the durability of building: shadows, geometries, light and the intention of angles. This pocket book surveys his poetic writings, built and unbuilt projects. More specifically, it highlights the lost important projects in architecture and how each one either complies or confronts with the Mediterranean landscape. It also explores the contemporary architectural spoliation, that is, the recycling and reuse of not only the buildings but also the landscape in which his buildings occupy or recline in.

Building Around Architecture FRANCESCO VENEZIA OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM looks at themes in Francesco Venezia writings and works that expand on the evolution of fragmentary design strategies and their pre-Christian foundations, relevant in terms of the circular economy. And it questions critically the interrogation of Italy’s foundations and conditions for productive reuse