PANORAMA

Thus I was walking one day on the well-paved quay of that Neptunischen Stadt where to winged lions honors divine are paid . . . (J.W.Goethe). A small little boat is sailing over the flat surface of a quiet lagoon. Imagine to touch the water. Feel your body reacting to the endless movement of the waves; time doesn’t flow straight anymore. You are leaving the safety of the mainland entering into the realm of water.

Enclosed by the lagoon, circular domes floating in the golden light of the afternoon. Venice is like a siren, her palace a shining labyrinth built on small islands of mud over an underwater forest of strong alpine trees. She has spent ages singing alone in the middle of her own kingdom, forging dreams for the ever changing humans who reached her in search of beauty and fortune.

But she is not alone anymore.

Something obscure grew just at sight distance from her many beautifully arched windows. Trying to escape this sort of newborn twin sister, Venice intensified her charming melody, to a point that herself fell under the spell of this enchanted dream. No one now remembers when everything began, so that this sleep, day by day, resembles death evermore.

Waking up and let a dream pass by is always difficult. It forces you to face the reality, sometimes it can be brutal, but it gives you the opportunity to speak your true language, to narrate your own

story without being afraid of challenging your past.

Venice wears many masks. The “Serenissima” queen of the seas, the historical theme park consumed by million tourists every year, the contaminated land of Marghera, the uncontrolled sprawl of Mestre. The task is not to force these parallel dimensions into a simplistic unity but to connect them into a complex system through the only possible element that unifies these different realities: water.

The concept lies in the creation of a new water metro, functioning as a new connection level to be added to the complex network of stratified layers of the city. The movement of the boats that link one landing to another, sailing through the always uncertain margins that separate water from lands, embodies the mutable and impermanent nature of this new lightweight level.

The lagoon areas, traditionally regarded as voids, become now the center of a new system, physically represented by the landing docks that symbolize, at the same time, the dynamic relation between water and the city that has always been a distinctive mark of Venice. The new infrastructure provides also interesting solutions in the field of sustainable mobility: using low-polluting quick boats new links are created between the main attractors of the city, offering new opportunities for the whole system.

Complex organisms have indeed higher chances of survival than simple ones. The key nodes of the network function as a connection that provides a continuous exchange from the system to the city, helping in the process of understanding its complexity and in the continuous redefinition of its identity. The new layer operates in fact as a sort of new algorithm to re-program the city in order to face the most important issues of its near future, from the population problem to the process of re-industrialization, confronting with the environmental threats that menace its very existence.

Let’s imagine a city

in which inhabitants can fulfill their desires,

events take place and unexpected things have the chance to occur.

A city in which face the change and meet the future without fear.