The islands in the lagoon, palaces on the Grand Canal and the church façades of the Serenissima: Cristina Cappellari and Ferruccio Costantini illustrate Venice's architecture in drawings that they show in books and booklets.
Text: Sandra Hofmeister
The shop in the Salizada San Canzian in Cannaregio is only a few square metres in size, but a universe of its own opens up behind the window of the bottega. Posters with floor plans and elevations of palaces and churches hang on the walls of the small room, which holds no more than a desk and a few shelves. There are site plans of islands and coloured drawings of all the models of the ACTV – the abbreviation for Venice's municipal transport company, the Azienda del Consorzio Trasporti Veneziano. Notebooks and books are laid out on shelves, small, handy paperbacks in which Studio Saòr documents Venice's campi – that’s the correct term for all the squares except Piazza San Marco – in clear architectural drawings in black and white.
Drawing as a passion
‘We always loved drawing, even when we were studying architecture at the IUAV University in Venice,’ says Cristina Capellari. Together with Ferruccio Costantini, she founded Studio Saòr in 2014 – a creative office for architectural illustrations with a bottega in the dense labyrinth of alleyways near Santa Maria Formosa. The two architects' passion turned into a business idea: Studio Saòr. Since July 2021, the creative duo, who send their illustrations all over the world, have had the beautiful little bottega in Cannaregio - in addition to a website, of course, which sends their posters, paper model sets and bags out into the world to order.
Sweet and sour preparation
In Venetian cuisine, ‘saòr’ refers to a particular type of sweet and sour preparation of fish and vegetables. ‘Sarde in Saòr’ are sardines marinated in caramelised onions with sultanas and pine nuts - a local dish in Venetian cuisine. With its name, the architectural duo builds a bridge from the kitchen to their own identity: Studio Saòr is Venetian through and through, like all the buildings designed by Cristina and Ferruccio. But perhaps, according to the architects and entrepreneurs, other cities with their squares and architecture are also worth considering.
Drawing books
Much has been written about Venice for centuries. Goethe, Ruskin and Rilke all wrote about the city in their poems, essays and travelogues. The Russian poet Josef Brodsky called it an ‘earthly Eden’ in his poems. The handy books by Studio Saòr honour Venice in a completely different way and do not fit into this grand canon. They do without text - they are pure drawing books that capture architecture with strokes and lines. In true-to-scale floor plans, squares in the lagoon city are compared in the small books, while the elevations of churches and palaces show their different sizes and shapes. There are large and smaller, mostly L-shaped ‘campi’, some of which are more private in character, while others have a representative public function. What comes next after all the bridges and towers, churches and palaces remains a surprise. But either way, Cristina and Ferruccio will remain true to their method of illustrating with architectural drawings.
The “Catalogo Veneziano” edition has four paperback volumes with “Campi”, “Chiese”, “Ponti” – the bridges-collection has two volumes. You can order the books directly at the shop: studiosaor.com
