VENICE TERMINAL

The Project is rethinking the arrival of visitors and commuters in Venice, which generate a second Population of the City every day. Located at the land entrance point of the city, this multimodal terminal forms a new bridgehead for Ponte della Liberta and extends the public space of Venice with its road and canal network, while simultaneously turning in on itself to create a flexible and complex urban environment which generates a gradient between the logistic island and the historic center, a transition between the present and past.

Venice is a City which was layed out to be approached by ship, layed out to arrive at the vast Piazza San Marco which represented the cities wealth and economic power. When the link to the mainland was created in the late 19th century the perception of Venice was inverted, one would now enter it from the backdoor.

By creating a new Piazza and repeating the ensemble of Piazza San Marco the perception of the City is being mirrored, the arrival is being given a place. The trajectories of movement generate a spatial network with optimized paths, that stages the arrival of visitors and visualises this never ending flow of tourists and commuters, hoping to create a reflected perception of the visitors impact on the City.

The aim of the project is to change the pre-established images of visitors, to create a deeper insight into the historical, cultural, economical processes within the city, in order to change the behavior of visitor and guide them away from the tourist core areas.

The terminal is operative 24 hours a day, next to a car bus and train terminal, it houses a apm station which links it to Tronchetto and the cruise ship terminal, a Water terminal which provides it with a city check in for the airport, it is also running a shuttle between the historical center and its outskirts to vitalize the historical centre of Venice also during the night.

Programmatic volumes such as auditoriums and exhibition spaces are nested within the structure The path system is layed out for flexible program in order to be able to the City and its events but also to react to different future scenarios . The project is testing the typology of a multi layered public space which is provoking the idea of implementing it on the city to provide it with a second layer.

Exhibiting the past, collecting and presenting the actual and projecting the future, this building aims to create critical reflection that undermines cliched images of Venice provoking another round of the modernization vs. conservation discussion.