‘Double Houses’ in Renaissance Venice by Giorgio Gianighian / TPOD, THEMA, HITAM

With the term “double house,” I indicate a traditional building containing two intertwined dwellings, each enjoying its own privacy: separated entrances with ground-floor facilities, mezzanines, and noble floors, with individual stairs connecting all the floors of each dwelling. The first double house in Venice was designed in 1534 by Antonio Scarpagnino for the Scuola di San Rocco. He provided its members with a very detailed description of such a building, presenting a project so precise that we can attribute to him the paternity of the invention. The invention consists of obtaining a double-volume house on a single building plot. It meant saving land in a city where it was scarce and had to be “stolen” from the lagoon, while the population was constantly growing, reaching over 150,000 inhabitants in the middle of the 16th century. Therefore, saving space was a major issue, while the traditional building practice in Venice implied the presence of a courtyard, where a cistern was built: the collection of water was, indeed, essential in a city completely deprived of natural sources of this vital resource. Thus, saving land had to be reconciled with the need for free surfaces to collect rain. This gave birth to the internal cistern, filled with rainwater collected from the roof and conveyed through clay pipes enclosed in the walls. Another important new element was a new type of staircase, called the Leonardo style or double stairs, which brilliantly solved the problem of connecting the different parts of each dwelling without intruding on the neighbors.
In conclusion, the construction of Castelforte San Rocco will be analyzed, with the aid of the priced bill of quantities and the progress chart, revealing the total cost—5,815 ducats—shared among the blacksmith (9%), stonemason (31%), bricklayer (42%), and two types of carpenters (18%).

Giorgio Gianighian is an architect and the Vice Director of the International Research Center for Architectural Heritage Conservation at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He previously taught at IUAV in Venice, where he held the position of Full Professor of Architectural Heritage. As the Venetian correspondent for the heritage magazine ANANKE, Professor Gianighian has published over 100 works—including three books, essays, and articles—on the history of architecture and restoration in several languages besides Italian.

Neighbours Lecture Series Vol. 5

27/2 - Eyal Weizman (Forensic Architecture / Goldsmiths University). Conditions of Life Calculated
19/3 - Hannah Leroux (University of Sheffield). The Africa Section: Foreign Aid Drawings in the Development Decades
2/4 - David Wengrow (University College London). Origin Stories: An Archaeological Perspective on Human Freedoms
16/4 - Theodora Vardouli (McGill University). Graph Vision
7/5 - Debjani Bhattacharyya (University of Zurich). The Double Commodification of Monsoon: Risk and Cyclone Science
21/5 - Giorgio Gianighian (Shanghai Jiao Tong University). ‘Double Houses’ in Renaissance Venice