This seminar explores Venice, a place where multiple histories of politics, commerce, religion, art, and science intersect, all of which presuppose a unique reciprocity of architecture and urban form. This course traces the genesis and the development of the city from late antiquity to the present; investigates how political myth and urban reality are mutually implicated in the Piazza S. Marco, the Rialto, and the Grand Canal; and studies how singular forms of continuity and collective memory come together to shape the interaction of type and morphology. The seminar also examines the various formal, functional, and structural strategies that architects as diverse as Mauro Codussi, Jacopo Sansovino, Palladio, Scamozzi, Longhena, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Gardella, Scarpa, and Eisenman have deployed when coming to grips with the singularity of Venice. The second half of the seminar analyzes the challenges faced by contemporary practices when trying to negotiate with the historical image of a city that remains uniquely resistant to change. The course ends by repositioning the Venice Biennale historically and ideologically in terms of the dialogue it has fostered between the contemporary culture of the spectacle and the diverse imperatives of historical understanding – a dialogue often compromised by multiple equivocations but also driven by the desire to renew the discipline that has Venice as a privileged focal point.