Venice reflected. The observations and impressions of Lawrece Halprin

“I remember with great clarity the greatest urban experience I have ever had. It was in Venice in winter. In front of the church of San Marco, the great square, which Napoleon called the most beautiful drawing room in Europe, was empty”. In some of his many writings, the American landscape architect Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009) chooses Venice as the 'dramatic' setting within which to practice a profound experimentation of the urban dimension from a careful understanding of its unique heritage. The paper aims at analyzing the modernity underlying the 'choreography of the city' staged in Lawrence Halprin's work and assesses his original look at public space understood as a three-dimensional environmental experience. Halprin's research is motivated by a desire to explore the patterns, representations and constituent elements of the city, as well as the sense of belonging of its inhabitants. His contribution to the spread of a renewed urban culture is made explicit in the image of a city conceived as a 'landscape of open spaces' that anticipates the foundations of a modern ecological aesthetic.