The form and the space of the Venice’s city

The city is a “system of connection”: a set of relationships between the building typology and the urban morphology, between the positioning of the monuments in relation to the fabrics, between the discipline of the plan and the need to give form to places and spatial quality of contexts. This “system of connection” is evident in the historic city, which it’s structured through the formation of dense and compact “fabrics” and it recognizes its element of formation in the concept of “urban block”. The paper aims to show an experience of research activity at the RWTH Aachen University started from the reading of the urban forms of an extremely singular city such as Venice. Through codified tools of urban analysis and the most recent spatial reading tool of the city - fundamental to understand and define the reasons of architecture project - it’s possible to understand the morphology of Venice, characterized by a dense and uniform fabric, in which the only open spaces are the “campi”. A careful consideration also identifies an extremely articulated urban fabric of Venice: many are the “primary elements”, such as the great religious complexes and prestigious buildings, which represent the “catalyst” of the historic Venetian fabric. Recalling Schröder’s studies, for which the urban form is examined in its spatial value, measuring the degree of internality or externality that characterized the spaces of the city, Venice, historical city, is the emblem of the city made of delimited and compressed spaces, and of interior’s spaces.