Learning from Venezia

Abstract

If in recent years reuse has progressively established itself as one of the central references of contemporary architectural design, the question today no longer concerns only how to reuse, but how to teach design when buildingisnolongeranecessarypremise. ThispaperreinterpretstheteachingactivityofFrancescoVenezia— developed between 1986 and 2014 across several Italian and international universities—as an early articulation of the categories Remind, Reuse, Renounce, Reduce. Taking Venezia’s pedagogy as a field of inquiry, the re- search shifts attention from the production of the new to a design method grounded in the reading, selection, and transformation of what already exists. Within this framework, Remind operates as the memory of archi- tecture’s constructive and logical principles. In courses based on redrawing and rewriting—such as Idee allo stato nascente—students engage with projects by Libera, Le Corbusier, or Mies not to imitate them, but to reconstruct their generative devices through drawing (Burlando, Campo, and Pinna 1995).

Reuse appears as the projectual reuse of disciplinary materials: sketches, unfinished projects, fragments. In exercises on unbuilt or interrupted works, the original drawing becomes a base for transformation, activating processes that avoid both imitation and replacement (Ciruzzi et al. 1995).
Renounce corresponds to a conscious rejection of spectacle and of the autonomy of the architectural object. In courses such as Addizioni, the project takes the form of minimal insertions, where building is not a necessity but a choice to be assessed (Cendron et al. 2001). Reduce, finally, runs through the pedagogical framework as a reduction to essential principles. In courses on light, the horizon, or minimal elements, the project is brought back to a limited set of relationships (Venezia 1988; Venezia 2011).

Learning from Venezia thus means adopting a critical stance in which reuse becomes a matter of judgment.