This moment, this exact feeling.
I wish I could save it for another time.
According to Walter Benjamin
Art before mechanical reproduction, i.e.
photography had an aura.
Aura is the here and now of the work of art.
It's this unique existence and nothing else that bears
the mark of the history to which the work has been subject.
Aura is basically the stuff that the original has,
but the reproduction, no matter how precise it is,
it doesn't have because the original is tied to a specific time and place.
But now that we have the capability
to reproduce things, we don't really have to restrict ourselves
to going to the louver to see the Mona Lisa.
And according to Benjamin,
this is a very important distinction, and it changes our relationship to art.
He goes as far as to say that the more you replicate
a piece of art, the value of that art goes down.
And it's not just art objects.
Some places also have an aura.
I'm sitting on this floor
listening to the seashore, and I feel the aura of the beach.
But when I take this home so that I can have
a little piece of the beach all the time, it has less aura
and this has even less aura.
Aura is attached to the thing and its purely unmediated form.
The beach is there, sharing the same space and time as me.
Today you see lots of mediations of the beach,
and that shows the change in our societal values.
We value things for their ability to be seen by the largest number of people
rather than for their unique existence.
And apparently we're accelerating this loss of aura with our constant
desire to pry an object from its shell
or to be close to something or to be able to examine it.
But mind you, Walter Benjamin wrote this theory in 1936,
and maybe if he was alive today, he would have had a totally different idea,
like what a about and of TS.
It could be the one and only copy in this world,
but you know, it lives in the digital realm.
So the concept of its presence in space and time is kind
of totally irrelevant, right?
But I think the
part of this theory that still is very relevant
is how we interact with objects that we deem to have an aura
when an object is deemed to have an intrinsic value.
We might guarded or hide it away and we probably spend
more time looking at it in a more contemplative manner.
When people say when you go to look at the Mona Lisa, try to experi
in the painting and try to be in its presence.
But with reproducible works of art, we tend to look at it
less carefully or speed through it in a less focused manner.
It's the same with information.
When books were handwritten over time span of years,
they used to hide them from the public because they were scared
that they were going to get damaged or burned or lost, and they would
literally change the books to the desks.
And what happened is, when you finally got a hold of the book,
you would read it and really taken every word of the book.
But now, with massive amounts of information everywhere we go.
I think it's pretty safe to say that we take things a little less to heart. Hmm.
Umberto Eco, author and Semiotician, said that books in his library had an aura.
He had a collection of 50,000 books, and he said as he would roam
around his library on more than one occasion, he would stumble across a book.
And when he read it, that book magically contained information
that was vital to the research.
He was a really strange person, but he called his library and
and he library and he filled it with books that he'd never read.
He said, lots of people have a library to show
off their knowledge, to see look at all these books I read.
But he uses it as a research tool and he roams around his library.
And I think he believes that he is
physically inches away from discovering new information.
And that physical presence of the books
had the power to pull him closer to what he needed.
This idea of aura or the loss of aura in our culture isn't just happening with art
or information, but it's also happening with
our built environments.
Cities are made
up of streets, and streets are characterized by the buildings.
Facades.
A building's facade is basically a fancy name.
Well, for the building's face, it expresses the building's character,
and it gives you a glimpse of what might be happening inside.
And it's designed to catch people's attention.
With our culture's obsession with images, we experience architecture differently.
And our environments are adapting to satisfy this new way of experiencing
architecture all the way down to the process of how we design.
We tend to focus more on the shareable moments in our buildings,
and I am totally guilty of this.
Architecture is becoming increasingly rushed and impatient,
leading to issues of experiential impoverishment.
Our built environments are void of any sense of mystery or aura.
And just like what's happened with art or information,
I think the way we experience the world is becoming more and more one dimensional
and we start to value architecture, not necessarily
for its experiential qualities, but for its ability to be photographed
and seen by the largest number of people.
Venice is
probably one of the most extreme examples of a city
whose aura has been completely and utterly destroyed.
Thanks to the iconic images, it's become one
of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.
It gets something around 20 million visitors every year.
It shows movies and books, and it's probably
one of the most universally recognizable locations.
I'm not going to lie.
When I first visited Venice, I also had my preconceptions until
I learned this concept called the Reef,
which directly translates into drifting.
It's actually a method devised by the Situationist International
for navigating through Venice, and they define the reef as an unplanned
and unexpected passage through an urban landscape
where participants stop their daily routines and allow themselves to be drawn
by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters that they find there.
It's a place of both connection and non connection.
A place designed specifically for getting lost
from a totally functional point of view.
Venice's kind of the worst place to live.
It floats. It's full of tourists.
The buildings are old.
It's practically not accessible for anyone with mobility issues.
And you can't drive. You can't bike.
And in that sense, it's the ultimate antiquity.
So why is it that so many Venetians who's been driven
out of the city for all of these reasons that I just mentioned, still dream
about one day moving back there and living there.
I think it ultimately has something to do with oral,
but in the end it's a totally and completely unique place.
There's no other place like it on Earth.
There's no one else that can replicate the environment,
the history, and the city's presence in time and space.
Not even the most perfect replica has the aura of Venice.
But as an architect, I still try to look for patterns in the built environment
not necessarily to replicate, but to see if there's any elements
that we can learn from.
And as I tried to study the built
fabric to understand why it feels so different from other cities,
I was able to distill certain elements or recurring conditions
that helped in creating the sense of mystery.
Framing.
Framing is used to hide or highlight certain elements.
In this case, a narrow gap between the corners of two buildings perfectly
frame the corner of the Basilica de Ferrari
deadens a key aspect of the drive.
Or drifting is allowing yourself to be drawn by the attractions of the terrain.
And as I drift through these alleys, I kept coming across these dead ends.
Initially, I'd turn around and backtrack, but on instances
when I kept going, I found that it's not a dead end after all.
And the corner reveals another alley point of interest
as I move through these narrow alleys.
I kept feeling a constant pulling like a push to keep walking.
It's obviously
the narrowness of the tunnel, but also the light at the end of the alley
or a tunnel that created this point of interest, compression and release.
When I follow the light and reach the end of the tunnel,
I would often be pleasantly surprised to find myself in a light filled courtyard
or an opening to a canal or anything, but created a feeling of expansion.
And as I walk for hours and hours, I felt a constant
compression and release in the landscape.
Layering, layering creates anticipation, depth, and a more interesting
and memorable narrative when walking through space.
Well, all of these conditions do, for me is it created a sense of curiosity
that made me want to discover more and also a kind of safety.
I never once felt scared or like I was in danger.
The city is so, so safe because there's no dangerous corners.
That sounds like a really obvious statement, but let's say
a typical city with streets and back alleys, the alleys
or the leftover spaces and you know, that's where all the dodgy stuff happens.
But in Venice, everything is an alley and there's no
front and back and everything is just a continuous labyrinth.
And there's doors and windows onto each path.
So after walking around for a while and just being left by my curiosity,
that's when I discovered really cool gems.
Lots of people think Venice is a static city.
I mean, there's been virtually no new construction in Venice
for hundreds of years, but actually it has been transforming at a micro-scale
since we can only guess the functions inside the buildings urge us to discover
more rather than telling us exactly what they are.
You see this especially in the neighborhood of Cannery Row,
which was once a Jewish ghetto, these seemingly benign residential buildings.
When you go inside, they have synagogues with ornate, lavish details
that you can only discover by exploring further inside.
It's our knowledge that things that we're sure of
that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.
We have a tendency to put the things that we know
or knowledge on a pedestal and treat it as the ideal truth.
When our knowledge is often incomplete and subjective.
Venice only started to reveal itself to me when I left
my preconceived ideas of Venice and kind of allowed myself to be lost
and blindly led by my curiosities and instincts.
I let my feet choose the wrong turns and
and I let the light or the textures draw me into different directions.
And only then did I discover a side of Venice
that was totally and intimately unique to me.
This Venice is fleeting.
You can't photograph it, and you can't take it with you, and it can't be shared.
This Venice can only be experienced and live as a memory.
This Venice has an aura that can't be destroyed
because it can never be replicated and never fully
attained.
This video is a part of a bigger project where I try to turn
some of the ideas from my thesis project into a series of videos.
The videos together create a whole.
So if you found this video interesting, I want to check out the rest.
I'm going to leave the playlist right here.
There's also so many ideas and concepts in the thesis I'm
not able to capture neatly in a ten minute YouTube video.
So if you want to read the entire thesis project in detail,
you can access the digital copy by clicking the link
below in the description and by becoming a producer or of the channel.
By becoming a producer, you're supporting me and continuing to make these
theses videos, which is something I absolutely love making,
but they're a huge amount of work and they're very expensive to make.
I decided not to have any brand sponsorships on these
and if it's backed by a community that actually wants to see it through,
it'll have more meaning that way.
Stay tuned for the next video, which I'm probably going to get out in the next
two months.
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and the membership tiers in the description.
And with that, I'll see you in the next video, bye!