Buildings

Buildings

The built environment of Venice reflects centuries of architectural evolution, adaptation, and shifting patterns of residential and economic activity. This page provides an overview of how Venetian buildings are classified, how they are used today, and what recent analyses reveal about their structure, height, residential capacity, and vacancy. It incorporates extensive measurements, geospatial analysis, and modeling to improve building-scale understanding across the historic center.

Building Types & Classification

Overview of Venetian Classification Systems

Venice classifies its buildings through a structured system that identifies architectural typology, construction period, and predominant functional characteristics. This classification helps describe when, how, and for what purpose each building was constructed, enabling a clearer understanding of the city’s urban fabric and its evolution.

For more details on individual building types, uses, and classification logic, see this page (https://wiki.cityknowledge.org/index.php/Building). This page provides comprehensive descriptions of Venetian building categories, examples of each type, and further technical documentation that complements the classification system summarized here.

Architectural Typology (Tipologia Edilizia)

Architectural typology identifies building form, organization of interior space, and structural hierarchy. Typology categories include long-standing Venetian forms such as monocellular, bicellular, tricellular, polycellular, unitary, modular, and shed structures.

These typologies were essential to our models because different types exhibit distinct relationships among measured height, floor height, and the expected number of floors.

This map illustrates a block of buildings on the island of FANT, with each building footprint color-coded by its architectural type. The different colors represent variations in construction period, structural form, and intended use, allowing for easy visual comparison of how architectural types are distributed within a single urban block.