Venice & Manhattan

 VENICE & MANHATTAN

Antes de venir a NYC, mientras aun estaba en Venecia, busque un salvapantallas para el fondo de escritorio de mi ordenador de la ciudad y encontre la foto de arriba. Automaticamente mi mente reconocio los postes de la bahia y los comparo con los de la laguna de Venecia., (the bricole, duc d'albes). Pero no solo eso, hay mas similituted entre estas dos islas. Venecia fue el centro del mundo alrededor del siglo XVI y Manhattan del siglo pasado.

Evidentemente, no soy la unica que asocia estas dos ciudades, otros ya lo han hecho antes. Actualmente me estoy leyendo el libro "Paradig Islands: Manhattan and Venice - Discourses on Arquitecture and the City".

Before I came to NYC, still in Venice, I was looking for a picture of the city for the desktop of my computer and I found the top one. Automatically my mind recognized the posts of the bay and compare them with the ones in the lagoon of Venice, (the bricole, duc d'albes). Not only that, there are more similarities between these two islands. Venice was the center of the world around the sixteenth century and Manhattan was too just last century .

Obviously, I'm not the only one that associates these two cities, others have done before. I am currently reading the book "Paradig Islands: Manhattan and Venice - Discourses on Arquitecture and the City".

As the writer of
the book, I'm an architect and "I have lived, studied and worked in both
cities, and while certain similarities in how they work and are experienced
seemed self-evident from personal experience, I had also learnt that other
voices had suggested their association, through interpretations and
projects".

1- To start, I would like to compare the things that both
cities have in COMMON:

- Probably you
think that it is impossible to compare a contemporary metropolis with a
medieval city. But Manhattan is not just a contemporary metropolis and Venice
is not a medieval city: their exceptionality - physical, historical, commercial
and political - exacerbates their character and both complicate and facilitate
their study; their longevity and continues reinvention poses questions for the city
of the present.

- Venice in the
first half of the sixteenth century was a sort of New York of its times... (Giovanni
Scarabello and Paolo Morachiello).

- Both cities are
clearly geographically (island) and chronologically (period) defined,
investigating each city in the time that most influenced its spatial
definition. Both manifest a tension toward the present, choosing specific
moments of the past that can still inform not only the understanding but also
the making of the present.

- The decline of Venice has a direct connection with
the discovery of America. Both had a great naval importance. On one hand, from
Venice the ships went out to invade other territories; on the other hand, ships
came to Manhattan to invade the island.

- Been or are, in their own times and specific
situations, a metropolis. 

- Are islands generating networks of relations
that are much wider than their geographical limits. 

 - Two old cities that are now cores of vast
metropolitan expansions continue to function while undergoing constant change.

- Reveal a capacity to last by changing, adapting,
absorbing otherness, and newness. Their exceptional conditions, uniqueness and
continuity revolve around the persistence and effectiveness of fundative rules
that allow for change within continuity, as the cities mutate and reinvent
themselves to remain always present. 

- Can be read as specific systems of order, as both
islands were (and still are) formed according to precise rules of land
definition, urban organization and expansion that, while they do not predefine
a form, continue to produce it. 

- Both systems are defined by precise and repeatable
processes that are able to incorporate exceptions and transgressions; both
developed in time, and remain still open. Beyond the obvious differences of
their forms, it is a study of their makings that enables a possibility of
dialogue between the two. 

- The two cities resist the separations and
classifications that the modernist project imposes on architecture and urban
space, remaining incomprehensible to it because they both are, in different
ways, intrinsically indivisible.

- Venice's unresolved and explicit multiplicities and
be accessed rationalized through the simplifications and reductions of
complexity of Manhattan. Venice infiltrate the orthogonality of Manhattan. The
makings of both cities are operations of land definition and organization.

2- DIFFERENCES: 

- MANHATTAN:
Anti-modern. Repetitive orthogonality.

Resists the
European avant-gardes. As an alter ego to the European modernism, to open a
study of the metropolis that produces a manifesto for the contemporary city,
anticipating the themes that will inform his later research an projects. 

Is a place of total artificially defined by an
orthogonal layout that is volumetrically extruded, is a city that rebuids
itself by self-destruction, thanks to the possible transmigration of
movable traces within its artificial grid. 

Manhattan grew on an orthogonal system that first
defined a theoretical horizontal grid, and then regulated its vertical
extrusion, triggering a process of self-destruction and reconstruction that
still maintains the city in a perennially unfinished state.  

Is built as an artificial space, on a Grid that is
imprinted on the ground and ignores the nature of the island. Yes, the Grid
itself remains open and expandable: while its boundaries are determined by the
edges of the island, the Grid expands as the coastline moves outward with
artificial extensions. The gridded island can thus be read as a sampling of a
virtually unlimited grid, a centrifugal grid without a center. 

Only Broadway and Central Park are not artificial in Manhattan.
The sinuous diagonal section cut by Broadway transgresses the orthogonality of
the grid and renders explicit its effect. A fracture in the grid, it produces
in it a series of irregular triangular and trapezoidal blocks and intersections. 

Central Park as a gigantic anomaly in the Grid and a
product of its subdivisions. CP is not an island of natural preservation,
rescued and separated from the Grid, but the artificial re-creation of a
natural of the elements that intrude into the park: The reservoirs and the
museum are not part of the park proper: they are deductions from it. 

- VENICE: Anti-classical / pre-modern. Relational
elements and non-figurative orders.

In the 16th century resists the ordo of the classical that, inserted in its body, represents the novitas. Late-medieval and Renaissance
Venice was a metropolis of its time: for its situation of political and
commercial independence, for the dimensional leap that made it active and influential
from the most strictly local situations to the global one, for the congestion
of its space and the multiplicity of its commerce and communications, and for
the coexistence of apposite situations in close proximity.

Is a place of paratactic discontinuity that is build
gradually, island by island, in the mobile territory of its lagoon, is a city
that rebuilds its body on its own physical traces, reusing itself. 

Venice is a place of paratactic discontinuity that
grew by consolidating, adjusting to the moving topography of its lagoon; but it
is also a space that continuously connects, adapts and incorporates. 

Venice has no language, other than its unique
structure and organic nature. Venice possesses a flexible concept of both space
and time, one that defers decisions and constantly delays changes.

3- VERTICAL
& HORIZONTAL:

	VERTICAL	HORIZONTAL
MANHATTAN	-New York is a vertical city under the sign of the new times. It is a catastrophe with which a too hasty destiny has overwhelmed courageous and confident people, though a beautiful ad worthy catastrophe. (Le Courbusier). - New York is a vertical city under the sign of the new times. It is a catastrophe with which a too hasty destiny has overwhelmed courageous and confident people, though a beautiful ad worthy catastrophe. (Le Courbusier). - Vertical panoramic photography records the unfinished state of Manhattan, as an incomplete city that continues to destructo and rebuild itselt.	- The island is spread out like a sole in the water of the Hudson and East rivers. The fins along the two flanks represent the most perfect disposition of forms for a mercantile port. When you see it from a plane you think: Manhattan is a type area for a modern city. (Le Corbusier). - The city was expanding horizontally, and Manhattan had rapidly spread to occupy or speculate on the occupation of the whole of the Commissioners’ Grid that had been traced on paper one century before. This was the time when growth started to go vertical.
VENICE	- The upright lace of Venetian façades is the vest line time-alias-water has left on terra firma anywhere. Plus, there is no doubt a correspondence between – if not an outright dependence on – the rectangular nature of that lace’s displays – i.e., the local buildings – and the anarchy of water that spurns the notion of shape. (Joseph Brodsky). - Choosing to ignore the labyrinthine interior of Venice’s built tissue and canal network, this representation illustrates and celebrates the linear succession of vertical, rational and representative spaces that constitute what Quadri calls the Veneto Monument.	- And so being Venice an impossibility, she is also placed in the impossible, since she is founded on the sea, and in this she is out of the ordinary amongst all other cities. (Giovanni Nicolò Doglioni). -  Through the opaqueness of the atmospheric fog, the photographic association can return, (bring back) Venice to its nature of island, in a situation of horizontal spatial relation and coexistence with the water. - It’s read as a tensioned surface memebrane, precauriously stretched between water and sky.

MANHATTAN ROUND

VENICE LABYRINTHS

NY does not scrape the sky, it resounds in it with the compass of the systole and diastole of the visceral canticle of elementary biology… New York es not prismatic; New York is not white. New York is all round; New York is vivid red. New York is a round pyramid! (Salvador Dalì).

The city is built like a trap, a maze, a labyrinth… Perfectly opposed to de extensive, unlimited city, Venice has no equal in the inverse extreme except New York, (and sometimes, curiously, in this inverse extreme their charms bear a certain resemblance). Better yet, the only way no to meet someone in Venice is to follow him from a distance and not lose sight of him… he will always take you back to the center, by prodigious circumvolutions. (Jean Baudrillard).

4 - Architects who projected in both cities:

- Le Corbusier: 

a- Venice Hospital: The Hospital, positioned on the
water edge and facing the terra firma, denies water as a limit, and suggests
that the historical island of Venice es no longer the centre of a system, but
one of the centres of a ply-nuclear constellation characterized by growth,
explotion, fragmentation and dislocation of the centre in time.

b- United Nations Headquarters: The project is promoted
as the first fragment of the Radiant City in Manhattan, but in fact the
realized UN building will be the producto of a compromise: between Le Corbusier
and the architects team, between European theory and American praxis, between
the Radiant City plan and the existing Grid. 

- Peter Eisenman: 

a- Cannaregio Ovest project: Eisenman identifies three
post-Renaissance ways of defining urban space. The contextual strategy
elaborates a given existing context to reveal its latent and pre-existing
structure, in order to make it operative and significant. The socond way
consists in assuming a tabula rasa and designing a future ideal condition. The
third way to operte on the city isolates and places in the urban context
point-monuments, connected to each other by streets or by other relations.

b- Project for the IFCCA Prize Competition for the
Design of Cities: This project marks another significant development in the
definition of the role of architecture in the city, whose forms and rules
directly inform the project but are subverted by it. 

Beyond theoretical architectural provocations and
beyond the impossible total erasures and urban replacements dreamed by Le
Corbusier, eisenman’s project engages with the urban Grid, works with it, questions
its orthogonality, order and boundaries, and works on it “in architecture”.

RELATION BETWEEN MAJOR AND MINOR
ISLANDS:

 

- Venice, main island in the lagoon, is in the shape
of a fish, as Long Island, one of the minor island in New York, (despite being the largest island
in the United States).

- Long island & Lido: Both islands were built to
accommodate the residences of the rich in summer holidays, near the beach.

 - Venice is a synthesis of a tentacle morphology,
today still visible in the structure of the island of Murano, and a mat
morphology, clearly exemplified by the structure of Chioggia, (Linear
organization along a central rectilinear canal where are the public buildings):

 Venice

Murano

Chioggia

- The combination of these islands: Lido + Pelestrina
+ Cavallino, is very similar to these
other ones: Rockaway + Long
beach + Jones beach + Fire island. 

- Also the landscape in Lio piccolo, (North lagoon) is
is extremely similar
to South Shore Estuary
Reserve, (South Bay). Here, what is more, we can find the Jones Beach Water
Tower. This tower was
curiously inspired by the
Campanile di San Marco, (the bell tower that offers an incredible view of Venice):

Lio Piccolo

South Shore Estuary Reserve

 St Mark's Campanile

 Jones Beach Water Tower

- As icons of the city islands, we can compare the
island of San Giorgio Maggiore, (Andrea Palladio), to the Liberty Island with
the Statue of Liberty, (Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi). Both in a small island near the main one.

- Finally, in both cities hospitals and psychiatric hospitals
were located on islands auxiliaries.

CURIOUS COINCIDENCES:

- Bridges: connect internally Venice and externally with terra ferma. Four main bridges crossing the Grand Canal: The Rialto Bridge, The Ponte degli Scalzi, The Ponte dell'Accademia and Constitution Bridge, (this last one designed by Calatrava). like Manhattan. Also, 15 bridges are connecting Manhattan with New Jersey, The Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens: Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge, Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, High Bridge, Washington Bridge have special mention.

- In Venice, all religious buildings and monuments are illuminated at
night, while in Manhattan the lighting focuses on skyscrapers. 

- Subway & water buses: 

New York City's harbor and multiple waterways are what once made it the center of trade, but in modern times where water transport is less common they make it a city of bridges and tunnels. The metropolitan underground transport system constructs
in fact a connective network that is alternative to the Grid: it follows the
Grid’s order, but connects rather than divides, suggesting possible combinations
of vertical and horizontal articulations. The Subways are not deductions
because their effect, on the whole, is to enlarge, not lessen, the
opportunities of escape from buildings. 

The vaporetto
is a public ferry service that operates, for all intents and purposes, as the
bus network of Venice. (The name derives from vapore, or
"steam," since that's what used to power these public people-movers).
Vaporetti take visitors along the main canals, to the islands, and
around the lagoon. 

- In both cities people walk a lot and faster, probably NYC is
where people more walk around in USA, and the same in Italy with Venice. (Don't forget a pair of good sneakers if you are going to visit one of these cities).

- Góndola is a traditional, flat-bottomed Venetian rowing boat, well suited to
the conditions of the Venetian lagoon. Unbelievably, Central Park has its own authentic handcrafted gondola straight from the canals of Venice, 
imported from that venerable city and donated to the Park Conservancy. Originally introduced in 1862 and manned by authentic Venetian gondoliers a Park visitor could hire one to pole them around the Lake while being serenaded to the then popular tunes from the operas of Puccini and Verdi.

 In
both places, only the tourists use it.

  

- The bricole (duc d’albes) in the lagoon in venice,
as the only vertical elements of a liquid space, with the posts
of the bay in Manhattan. The fog obscures the vertical reference points, lagoon
bricole and the resulting image is never sharp on its edges, and defined only
by moments: illuminations are the poins where the attention focuses on the
limits, trying to grasp it with photography, and never succeeding.

- To orient yourself on the big apple, you must be
guided by the number of avenue and street, find signals at all crossings. Similarly,
we find signs throughout the city of Venice that organize tours.

- Hilton
Molino Stucky Venice, Venice, built from a 19th-century flour mill
located on Giudecca Island is the Hilton Molino Stucky Venice. Overlooking the
Giudecca Canal with spectacular views of the city’s skyline, this hotel is just
minutes away from St. Mark’s Square. The tower in one corner, covered with copper, can
remember perfectly Manhattan skyline as The Trump Building, 40 Wall Street, dubbed which ones
was dominating the skyline of lower Manhattan with its ornate pyramidal crown
and gothic spire, (by he way, I was scanning 2 floor of this building, you can
find it in other of my posts):

- Both have a high number of rats:

- Gran Canal & Canal St.  (by Daniel Zilio).

- Statel Island Ferry, (free) & Traghetto. (by Daniel Zilio).

- In conclusion, I would like to compare the lifestyle of
both cities. Life in Venice itself is artificial, is kept alive by the wave of tourists
in high season and students in low season. The few 100% Venetian living in it
should go to terra ferma on a regular
basis; otherwise it will remain a timeless state as the city itself. However,
in the secondary islands this does not happen and you can still breathe pure local
life. In addition, Manhattan is an incessant movement, especially at peak times,
like tourists in Venice, but here are the residents themselves, thousands of
them moving for work. Probably the place more artificial in Manhattan is Times Square, today cleaned up by disneyfication, colonized by tourists, largely pedestrianized, and
occupied by 24-hour outdoor cafés and private businesses guarded by both city
and private police, stages an artificial European-style street life that takes
place in the gaps of the Grid (and almost despite it), reclaiming for public
corporate and commercial use the space between and outside its city blocks. The opposite happens in Long Island, where people live more
relaxed and drives their cars to go everywhere with higways between woods.