The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Barry Curtis
tem. 1 I was interested in the perpetual plight of that city, because for me it
clearly exemplifies how meanings can both persist and be subject to the
relativism of constant historical rearticulation. Venice, as well as being a
potent memory theater, also engaged me in the pleasurable experience
of tourism—surrender, visiting and belonging, and participation in the
“Venetian” game of masking and revealing. Georg Simmel’s observation
that “Venice presents dualities that cannot be resolved into a synthesis” 2 gestures
toward the more general undecidability of urban experience.
The paradoxical nature of Venice has been firmly established by innumerable
admirers and detractors. It has been acknowledged as a universal
city—the sort of paradigmatic text deployed by Italo Calvino—but it is
also a bizarrely retarded supplement to the development of cities up to the
industrial age. It can be refigured as everlasting and perpetually “in peril,”
as a pedestrian precinct par excellence, as a city of aged inhabitants, as an
ecological conundrum, as a heritage city, as an international cultural center,
as a city of carnival and hedonism, and even as an attraction for a modern
telecommunications infrastructure. 3 It is both a freak and an archetype.
What interests me most here is that it is a paradigmatic “place.”
That Venice is primarily conceived as a paradox spurs us to further
considerations on the nature of cities, the relationship between past and
present, nature and culture, the ceremonial and the everyday, the appearance
and the reality. The exceptional status of Venice is that of a city supposedly
arrested and preserved in time. This “timelessness” has enabled memory to
work on it in a number of ways as a memory of the “first home” and as a
memory preserved by the nature of the changes enacted on the memorial
city. The various mythic understandings of the city have come to constitute
its meaning in ways that are more fundamental than those deployed to reconstruct
cities that have been adaptive to change. Venice is not layered; it
cannot be analogized like Pompeii, as corresponding to the levels of consciousness;
it is built on artificial foundations. Something of its unique nature
is captured in Simmel’s cryptic description of it as “a perfect mask that
hides being, or rather reveals the loss or absence of being.” 4
Venice as a densely produced “place” generates a kind of ideal in its
intensity and condensation, not just as an urban form but as a labyrinth,
maze, or trap: “a ritual circulation” in which confrontations with others and
self are produced. As Jean Baudrillard has also said, “there is no side exit in
Venice.” 5 The city in addition represents the inexhaustibility of place. As
early as 1494, Canon Pietro Casola expressed a perception that has been repeated
down the centuries and is echoed in every current guide book: “So
much has been said, there appears to be nothing more to be said.” 6 But the
very fixity of Venice has enabled it to be perpetually recast as a world city, a