venetian architecture 74 5
urban fabric.6 Houses arranged around interconnected courtyards in a
cellular pattern are still visible in the complex once occupied by Marco
Polo’s family at San Giovanni Crisostomo.7 Each of the islands became
a separate parish, with its church facing on to an open space known as
a campo (literally a field, although these were paved one by one over
the centuries). As the islets coalesced, continuous—if tortuous—streets
linked by bridges began to connect the parishes overland. Subsequent
land-drainage schemes, such as those enacted in the district of Cannare-
gio in the northwest in the late 13th and 14th centuries, adopted more
orderly layouts along straight parallel canals, through numerous individ-
ual private reclamations coordinated by strict planning controls.8
The individuality of the Venetian townscape depends on form, function,
and materials. The relative political stability and the strength of the public
realm ensured a degree of uniformity in the scale and distribution of the
housing stock: a mixture of rich and poor, secular and religious, populated
every parish. Although the workforce of the Arsenal was mainly concen-
trated in the east, and the fishermen around San Niccolo dei Mendicoli in
the west, noble families lived all over the city. It was not until the early
modern period that the Grand Canal became the most desirable address,
its banks gradually smoothed out to create a grand ceremonial route.
The city’s building materials created a distinctive palette of red and
white, complementing the greenish-blue of the water. Restorers and
architects alike are becoming only too slowly aware that the modernist
ideals of rigidity and impermeability are an anathema in Venice, where
all structures need to be both flexible and breathable to counteract the
unstable terrain and high humidity.9 Oak piles sunk into the soft sand
and mud provided the raft-like foundations for load-bearing walls, but the
constant flow of the tides made them inconveniently mobile. As a result,
6 Deborah Howard, Venice & the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on the Architecture
of Venice 1100–1500 (New Haven/London, 2000), pp. 6–7, likens this dense urban texture to
that of medieval Islamic cities.
7 Dorigo, Venezia romanica, 2:10–17.
8 Crouzet-Pavan, “Sopra le acque salse,” pp. 111–14, 119–20; Dorigo, Venezia romanica,
1:581–89.
9 On building materials and house construction in Venice, see especially Sansovino,
Venetia città nobilissima, fols 140r–142r; Abraham Rogatnick et al., Venice: Problems and
Possibilities, special issue of the Architectural Review 149/891 (1971); Richard J. Goy, Venetian
Vernacular Architecture (Cambridge, 1989); Goy, Building Renaissance Venice, pp. 79–97;
Dorigo, Venezia romanica, 1:113–16. On the construction trades and the building process, see
Goy, Building Renaissance Venice, pp. 65–77; Giorgio Gianighian “Building a Renaissance
Double House in Venice,” ARQ: Architectural Research Quarterly 8 (2004), 299–312.