Among the changes ushered in by the advent of mass printing is the fading memory that libro once referred as much to the bark of a tree as to a book, and that book—a cognate of beech—denoted a wooden tablet for carving runes. Nowhere did the book’s estrangement from its own natural history take shape more profoundly than in early Modern Venice, where hubs of paper-making worked in tandem with a booming printing industry to instigate the historic metamorphosis of librarious matter into abstract systems of communication technologies. To consider Venice as a city of elements is to evoke an agglomeration of buildings balanced amid the struggle between earth and water and above the transubstantiation of wooden piles into submerged columns of stone. Undergirding Venice’s architecture, in other words, are mutable elemental forces and everchanging living and non-living systems. Indeed, the printed page stepped into this flux precisely as a stabilising agent, extracting certain forms of architectural knowledge and relegating others to the perimeter.
Participants
SYLVIA LAVIN, New York, USA, 1960. Lives and works in Princeton and Los Angeles.
USA AD—WO NEW YORK, USA; ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA; MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA Emanuel Admassu, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1983. Lives and works in New York, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Melbourne. Jen Wood, Melbourne, Australia, 1984. Lives in New York, USA and works in New York, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Melbourne, Australia.
BESLER & SONS HOPEWELL AND CHICAGO, USA Erin Besler, Chicago, USA, 1982. Lives and works in Hopewell and Chicago, USA.
ALL(ZONE) BANGKOK, THAILAND Rachaporn Choochuey, Bangkok, Thailand, 1970. Lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand.
DESIGN EARTH CAMBRIDGE AND ANN ARBOR, USA Rania Ghosn, Beirut, Lebanon, 1977. Lives and works in Cambridge, USA. El Hadi Jazairy, Algiers, Algery, 1970. Lives in Cambridge, USA and works in Ann Arbor, USA.
FIRST OFFICE LOS ANGELES, USA Anna Neimark, Moscow, Russia, 1980. Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. Andrew Atwood, Charlottesville, USA, 1976. Lives in Los Angeles and works in Los Angeles and Berkeley, USA.
MOS NEW YORK, USA Michael Meredith, New York, USA, 1971. Lives and works in New York, USA. Hilary Sample-Meredith, Pennsylvania, USA, 1971. Lives and works in New York, USA.
LOW DESIGN OFFICE STATE COLLEGE AND AUSTIN USA; TEMA, GHANA DK Osseo-Asare, State College, USA, 1980. Lives in State College, USA and works in State College, Austin, USA, and Tema, Ghana.
A/P PRACTICE WUPPERTAL, GERMANY; FLORENCE, ITALY Maya Alam, Hagen, Germany, 1981. Lives and works in Wuppertal, Germany. Daniele Profeta, Rome, Italy, 1986. Lives and works in Florence, Italy.
Authorial Collaborators
Yasmine Abbas, Immersive Experiences Lab, Pennsylvania State University
Team
Sylvia Lavin: Tairan An (Coordinator), Foivos Geralis, Dimitris Hartonas, Maxwell Smith-Holmes, Chenchen Yan; AD—WO: Emanuel Admassu, Jen Wood, Katie Chizuko Solien, David Zhang; Besler & Sons: Erin Besler, Vaida Kidykaite, Yohana Ansari-Thomas, Meriel Vogliotti, Elaine Wang, Arianna Borromeo, Emilio Olivas, Shravan Arun; all(zone): Rachaporn Choochuey, Archaraporn Vachirasrisuntree, Aniroot Unjai, Rasarose Kitmungsa, Sirawich Sirichaipan, Thanatcha Tangsakulruanglai, Duangkamol Ponrpattanalertkul, Francesco Notari, Onno Hesebeck; Piyapong Bhumichitra (Graphic Design Consultant); DESIGN EARTH: Rania Ghosn, El Hadi Jazairy, Ekin Bilal, Monica Hutton; First Office: Andrew Atwood, Anna Neimark, Aram Radfar; MOS: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, James Wood, Bruce Hongming Liang, Alva Lind, Chad Miller, Leti Ryder, Studio Lin (Graphic Design); DK Osseo- Asare: Yasmine Abbas, Immersive Experiences Lab, Pennsylvania State University
Thanks
Monica Ponce de Leon
Supporters
Foundation for Architecture ETS; Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori; Princeton University School of Architecture and a David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Grant from the Humanities Council at Princeton University; Princeton University School of Architecture; MIT Architecture and University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning; Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc); Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown; Stuckeman School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Graphic Design at the Pennsylvania State University
