THIRD DIMENSION VENICE

To elevate Venice above its routines and its historic assets. To offer another vision of the city, rediscover and navigate it from a new dimension. An opportunity for Venice to renew itself, its flows, its perspectives and its geographical limits, while completely respecting and preserving its surfaces. Venice is a story of passions, and its destiny is necessarily steeped in controversy: a vestige to be rescued at all costs? A ruin to join Atlantis and history, forever lost to the water? Today, there is no zero-risk future for Venice in terms of the evolution of its ecosystem. And while its destiny may be inescapable, it remains possible to adapt the experience of Venice to a changing environment.

Third Dimension Venice is a network of cable cars radically altering established routes, dynamics and cityscapes, creating new proximities, and altering existing urban patterns while creating a layer of circulation above the evolving water lines. A new dimension in space, but also in time, that gives a renewed meaning to the experience of the city by creating new perceptions, bringing the horizon line back into the daily experience and fabricating new flows of circulation, and therefore fresh economic and lifestyle dynamics. A new layer of transit that disrupts the historic flows tied to sinuous vaporetti and gondola routes along the existing serpentine canal geography. A way to decentralize both established tourist routes and citizen commuting options, while creating the daily experience of Venice from above.

And if Venice’s destiny is to descend into the waters, Third Dimension Venice offers a platform to keep the city vibrant and evolving as its surface geography is altered. A platform from which a rooftop ecosystem can emerge, following yet-to-be-determined logics of a radically unpredictable world. Third Dimension Venice doesn’t attempt to alter the course of sedimentation and water levels; it creates an open infrastructure that can serve as a vector to allow growth and evolution on a different plane.

Glass capsules are suspended on a light network of cables suspended from the branches of pylons reminiscent of maritime pine tree silhouettes. Anchored in campos, the tree trunks are thin, high, and the branches emanate from the very top. The cable car stations are built on the rooftops of existing buildings, from which passengers can descend back onto the street level surface, or, if the streets become submerged, eventually evolve on a network of connected rooftop terraces and upper floors.

Six neighbourhoods are re-connected and brought into a new proximity in a light network of cable car stations: the Cannareggio will be connected to Dorsoduro via Santa Croce; the piazzale Roma will be linked directly to San Marco crossing over the Canal Grande.

Third Dimension Venice is an economic, low emissions system that will become increasingly relevant in periods of aqua alta, linking a city with a horizon, a past with a future – a platform to another level of experience and development in an ever changing and uncertain environment.