While Le Corbusier's urban projects are generally considered confrontational in their relationship to the traditional urban fabric, his proposal for the Venice hospital project remained an exercise in preserving the medieval fabric of the city of Venice through a systemic replication of its urban tissue. This book offers a detailed study of Le Corbusier's Venice hospital project as a plausible built entity. In addition, it analyses it in the light of its supposed affinity with the medieval urban configuration of the city of Venice. No formal attempt to date has been made to critically analyse the hospital project's design considerations in comparison to the medieval urban configuration of the city of Venice. Using a range of methodologies including those from architectural theory and history, using archival resources, on-site analysis, and interviews with important resource persons, this book is an interpretation of the conceptual basis for Le Corbusier understanding of the structural formulation of the city of Venice as mentioned in The Radiant City (1935). In doing so, it deciphers the diagrammatic analysis of the city structure found in this work into a set of coherent design modules that were applied in the hospital project and that could become a point of further investigation. Architects and other architecturally interested laypeople with an interest in Venice will find the book a valuable addition to their knowledge. For architectural historians the book makes an important link between modernism and the historically grown Venice.

From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.

In Design Thinking Peter Rowe provides a systematic account of the process of designing in architecture and urban planning. He examines multiple and often dissimilar theoretical positions whether they prescribe forms or simply provide procedures for solving problems—as particular manifestations of an underlying structure of inquiry common to all designing. Over 100 illustrations and a number of detailed observations of designers in action support Rowe's thesis.

This text explores an unbuilt yet iconic project by Le Corbusier - the Venice Hospital. It includes an account of de la Fuente's involvement in the project and a reprint of Alison Smithson's seminal essay on mat buildings.

Margaret Plant presents a wide-ranging cultural history of the city from the fall of the Republic in 1797, until 1997, showing how it has changed and adapted and how perceptions of it have shaped its reality.