STXDYOZ AND FORTUNY PRESENT NSA – THE NEW SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE IN VENICE CURATED BY RENATO RIZZI

Knowledge does not depend only on science or technology, but on a united vision, a culture critically capable of reflecting all times. Humanistic universities, especially those of Architecture, have reached their total exhaustion. No power, little knowledge and a lot of flavor. For Roland Barthes, the formula of wisdom captures the evident drama of contemporary culture where everything is now entrusted to technical-normative-socio-functional knowledge. Singularity has been usurped by arbitrariness.

The demand for a new vision, a new dream arises from both individual and institutional exhaustion. This requires a start from scratch where culture is not a progressive history but the repetition of the eternal.

New School Architecture, NSA, is a totally free, non-institutional school, founded on three principles: vocation, modesty and gift. At the beginning you teach what you have studied, then what you know and finally what you dream.

In the Scuola dei Luganegheri at Fondamenta Zattere in Venice, NSA takes place. Designed by Baldassarre Longhena, the old School is a perfect metaphor for the binomial word Architecture. Arché and téchne must mingle harmoniously as in the Venetian spicer. On the facade the statue of Sant’Antonio da Padova crushes and mixes the spices-culture to flavor the food-architecture. In the word archi-tecture converge the infinite plurality of connections. For this reason our self-referentiality must be overturned, not by principle but by nature and destiny.

This third series of lessons includes philosophy, poetry, theology, literature, physics, mythology, music and obviously architecture. Having Venice as its focal point, the con-temporaneous is addressed through the importance of the word Archi-tecture. A radical and urgent rethinking of culture, discipline, and the city, in response to the alarm that is not only scientific but above all educational.

The great subjects, fundamental figures of revolutions are the misunderstood, the heretics, innovators who expand the horizon of culture. They do not advance like a unidirectional and univocal arrow but broaden every horizon of time, of knowledge, of disciplines by reconfiguring it. Here is a first constellation of authors: Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Aldo Rossi, Plato, Dante, Emanuele Severino, Carlo Enzo, Wisława Szymborska, Fëdor Dostoevskij, Derek Walcott, Baruch Spinoza, Osip Emil’evič Mandel’štam, Franz Kafka, Henri Melville.