Visual relationship between monuments from the past and contemporary architecture. Masterpieces by Andrea Palladio and new spatial connections

This paper focuses on the opportunity to build new architecture next to relevant monuments constructed during past centuries. The theme was carried with reference to several famous works by the well-known Italian architect Andrea Palladio, who lived in the XVI century. The Basilica Palladiana, Palazzo Chiericati, the Palazzo del Capitaniato are artificially located in close proximity to other important but contemporary buildings. The freedom to assemble figures or fragments, to place them in another context, highlighted the effectiveness and decisiveness of a reading of urban design in which the figurative force is the result of consideration based on the visual relationships. The juxtaposition of well-known architectures by Palladio and other famous contemporary buildings provides form to new spatial connections in the environment and verifies new unthought-of opportunities to compose buildings and monuments that modify the space. The inventions resulting from the union of individual architectures into unitary visions that do not organically belong together is a particular iconography in which buildings abandon the passive and ornamental function thanks to which we have got to know them and reacquire an actively elevated role in the project. A similar procedure was experimented by the Venetian painter Canaletto, and can be seen in one of his best known canvasses called Caprice with buildings by Palladio (1756-59). So the project of the Rialto Bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice developed two centuries beforehand by Andrea Palladio, that never was built, is painted together with two other buildings by Palladio, Palazzo Chiericati and the Basilica. The paper is the result of students’ workshops, developed in the framework of the course on “Architectural and Urban Composition 2” taught on the master’s degree in Architectural Engineering at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering of the University of Padua.