It’s been decades since the Cornell school of teachers and architects held sway over American architectural education and, to a lesser extent, practice. Colin Rowe was the Cornell oracle, his interests, predilections, and mannerisms (double entendre!) passed on and disseminated through students and colleagues. While I didn’t attend Cornell, I did have a studio with Colin in Rome, and our School had a number of Cornell grads on the faculty. Their penchant for Le Corbusier eluded me, but I did become seduced by the facile way they talked about Renaissance buildings—mostly palaces and villas, not so much churches. If it was said that Cornell wasn’t all that interested in facades, that was more true of student work than the faculty. Certainly, Colin himself could talk for hours about facades, and some (but not all) of his students/colleagues shared his interest. One of them is Michael Dennis, who has just published a book on The Venetian [palace] Façade.
One of the questions about the Cornell worldview was their engagement with, or rejection of, classical architecture. They had a penchant for the locally symmetrical over the largely symmetrical; there was an interest in patterns but not so much what constituted the patterns (the classical orders); a preference for the façade as a “transparent” representation of what was happening inside. Because of the notoriety of his essay “Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,” Colin’s students (not, I would argue, he himself) equated Palladio and Corb because the two shared a planning armature of alternating wide and narrow zones (even if Corb inverted, or subverted, Palladio’s logic). So, the assumption was that the Cornell school was sympathetic to classicism, indeed had a privileged insight into its workings (and Corb was classical!). This is not, in my experience, true. It has occurred to me over the last few years that Cornell, because of Colin, was really more of a picturesque school, of an English kind (like Colin). Corb’s idiosyncratic villa planning, the preference for overall asymmetry, juxtaposing the regular and irregular (especially at the urban scale), disinterest in issues of language (much less meaning), these all produced an undercurrent of suspicion of normative classical ideals. And, often, a disinterest in the idea of types, or typology, and its “obligations.”
So, we have Michael Dennis’ book on Venetian facades. The cover is telling: of course, we find the Ca’ d’Oro, a favorite of Colin’s and a well-known facade generally; next to it on the left we find juxtaposed not its actual neighbor, but a bay of Michele Sanmicheli’s Palazzo Grimani (thank you Photoshop and AI). What does this say about the book? Despite admonitions to not judge books by covers, in my two books I was very deliberate about what was on the cover, and I suspect Michael Dennis was too. Like the Cornell admiration for the Hôtel de Beauvais—completely atypical with regard to the Parisian hôtel particulier typology—the Ca’ d’Oro is not composed like a typical, or normative, Venetian palace.
The facade type is determined by two things particular to Venice: the central portego, a hall running front to back on the piano nobile that served as grand salone and circulation node, it depended for light on the cluster of windows on the front façade (and often the back); and the fireplace in the center of the façade wall of the flanking, usually symmetrical, sale. Therefore, the typical Venetian palace façade had a grouping of three, occasionally four (and rarely five) central windows flanked by the two windows in the corners of the adjacent sala (on either side of its fireplace), the one closest to the portego often grouped compositionally with the portego’s windows. Even in Gothic examples the facade was typically symmetrical, because the portego was central. Examples abound up and down the Grand Canal, and around the city.
So, despite its rich decoration and materials, the Ca’ d’Oro is an incomplete, or imperfect, example of the type. The palazzo immediately to its left[1], later by more than 300 years and by no means as famous, is symmetrical. Dennis doesn’t show it, but instead juxtaposes a fragment of Sanmicheli’s imposing contribution to the type, importing High Renaissance romanità and masking the otherwise asymmetrically-disposed portego. Both the Ca’ d’Oro and Palazzo Grimani have eccentric main halls on the piano nobile, but the former is expressed on the outside while the latter is suppressed (an appearance of symmetry). Mauro Codussi anticipated Sanmicheli’s (and Sansovino’s) classicism and regularity at the Ca' Vendramin-Callergi (formerly Loredan), several decades later than the Ca d’Oro[2]. But by reducing Palazzo Grimani’s five-bay façade to a fragment, Dennis subverts its achievement of apparent regularity. And denies the reader a cover illustration of the normative type.
Types, I would argue, are cultural expectations of patrons rather than predilections of architects. They constitute what the patron, or their society, considers normative or essential for the dignity or decorum of the task at hand (whether a Venetian palace or a monastic church). Historically, architects worked hard to satisfy these patronage or societal demands, while dealing with challenging constraints of site, budget, or other impeding factors.
Michael Dennis is a smart, talented architect and teacher. But he has his predilections, and, with regard to his new book, caveat emptor: agendas, like palaces, often come in attractive packages.
[1] Palazzo Miani Coletti Giusti, or Duodo, probably by the painter-architect Antonio Visentini
[2] Cosussi eliminates the fireplace to put a window center of is sale, thus generating a five-bay facade
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