(Venice) Bubble Factory

Venice is facing the problem of raising sea levels that causes the city to be flooded yearly. The, sometimes called, other “flood” of the tourist is being perceived in a similar way. These problems are problems that most of us are well aware of. But essentially they are technical problems, which have naturally a technical counterpart in the form of a solution.

For cities to function they need to be attractive on a level that it brings people together. A lively city is a city that does exactly that. The question of how to do so for Venice is a delicate one, because Venice is more than just a city. It is an icon with such a strong image attached to it that it is almost impossible to either shatter it or propose an intervention that is not recognizable and falls back in this image. This image is so pressing that it kills almost all new development in the city. To do away with this image and have Venice  reborn again. That’s why we lift, we peel away the facade. Not only to show a much more sturdy part of Venice, the structure, the skeleton, the core, but also to show that this ties in with the natural landscape of the Lagoon (the meeting of land and water).

It is in this move that we create and free up this space again.

Having this “new” space, Venice can restart itself in the sense that there is room, again, for the city to grow and redevelop itself. But not growth and development in the traditional “stupid” way of “more and bigger.” But instead in a more sustainable way of better and denser. Sustainable in that we bring in the natural component of the land and water. The interface of land and water is the natural location for the creation of life as described within the discourse of biology. The architectural translation of this is that the interface of different social classes is the productive force that creates, forms and reshapes social live. The new rules of social interaction, that come with the productive creation of new social spaces are the grounding foundation for a viably economic development. Without an interface between people that have never met before, localized in a social space, no economical development can be sustained.

The creation of this new space is what we call the “bubble factory“. A factory that produces bubbles. The factory is the very base condition of Venice in which we incept the new seeds of, sustainable, growth.

Because we incept the bubbles so strongly into Venice, by linking it to the site conditions of land and water, the social conditions of the co-existence of social groups and the dwelling of the deep historical notion of Venice, they won’t come across as hostile and alien. Rather as foreign, foreign to both locals and non-locals.

This causes social boundaries to shift. People might find themselves all of a sudden in a different social group with different people they, at first sight, thought to be socially disconnected.