The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

On Memory and the City
meeting place between East and West, a city of surveillance, an inspirational
megastructure, and a model for cities of ritual and democratic participation.
Adrian Stokes, in his linking of the peculiar architecture of Venice and the
ways in which dream and memory are capable of reconfiguring significance,
finds a profound paradox: “So deeply laid are the imaginative foundations of
Venice, to such an extent has stone abrogated the meaning of soil in our
minds, that decay, as we have seen, takes the form of metamorphosis and
even of renewal.” 7 It is a model of the unknown and unknowable city, endlessly
put into classifications yet still capable of entering into new relationships
and meanings.
It is not surprising that Venice and other urban fragments that
were not heavily marked by the requirements of industrialization and modernism
should now be appropriable as models of place sharing what David
Harvey has defined as the dominant concerns of the postindustrial city. He
conceives that city as beyond the paradigms of function and organism, as a
lost plenitude and operatic scene—“the projection of a definite image of
place blessed with certain qualities, the organisation of spectacle and theatricality,
achieved through an eclectic mixture of styles, historical quotation,
ornamentation and diversification of surfaces.” 8
3.2 | Sites of bombs dropped by Austrian aircraft during the Great War.