The city of Venice. The form and the space

The city is a ‘system of connection’: a set of relationships between building typology and 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 historical city, which is structured through the formation of dense and compact ‘fabrics’ and 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 codifi ed tools of urban analysis and the most recent spatial reading tool of the city - fundamental to understand and defi ne the reasons of architectural 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 identifi es the 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 historical Venetian fabric. Recalling Schröder’s studies, for which the urban form is examined in its spatial value, measuring the degree of interior or exterior spatiality 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.