Transitory states of new Venice

The Venice Lagoon is a place where sea and land, as well as cultural forces, are in constant negotiation. It is a city that has always been on the edge, in a transitory state. The innovative experimentation and exploration have always defined Serenissima Republic of Venice. Nowadays, the city is gradually turning into a place completely dependent on visitors, and slowly transforming further away from being a legacy town on the edge, into a tourist’s Disneyland. The city is taking advantage of its historical legacy with virtually no productive economy. There has been a huge shift toward a service- and visitor-oriented economy that has forced most of the local population to relocate to the mainland. The city is sinking due to two processes: subsidence and marinisation. Venice is close to a saturation point and city authorities are trying to control both socio-cultural dynamics and the lagoon through top-down control modes which results in the creation of partially-closed systems. This approach to the constantly changing conditions of the Venetian estuary may lead to stagnation and collapse.

Our proposal is to create an open-system model for Venice, which can not only act remedially to resolve potentially-conflicting far-from-equilibrium conditions, but in fact perform productively and catalytically.

We are proposing to create and enable a productive node within the city, to initiate amphibious living through the creation of a fabrication facility for a new typology of water craft and to redefine city’s boundaries through seasonal events. The aim is to co-control fabrication processes using the lagoon fluctuation as an input, as well as using the recursive optimization feedback loops, in order to produce intelligent floating architecture with a morphology specific to the lagoon. Venice modifies its lagoon, no less than the lagoon modifies Venice.

We are working with the city edges, which are less loaded with tourist infrastructure and creating productive nodes that will overtime grow new aquatic living networks through Venice and its lagoon. Composite materials will be used for both the architectural tectonic systems and the water agents. Different densities and orientation of composite weave afford various degrees of porosity, mediation of atmospheres, and negotiation of shifting territories, and the transition between hard and soft elements in response to cultural pressures, estuary conditions and seasonal flows. The water agent is an autonomous unit that will have the ability to be programmed as a research cluster, exhibition space and event instigator and will occupy both the lagoon and wider city channels. These vessels/craft will have the ability to reconfigure themselves and form varying densities of architectural fabric by reshuffling its internal configuration and existing forms of connectivity. Venice with its historical artifacts becomes defined though productive interactions, evolving links that will reconfigure and reinvent itself overtime. This way the city’s morphology and configuration is not planed and predetermined but rather become formed under current pressures as well as have a future ability to be reconfigured to changing environmental, economic, political and social conditions.

Therefore, our proposal is aquatic living networks, vivisystems that are extensions of both the aquatic estuary and the city environment that accommodates borderline conditions in order to create ephemeral, non-deterministic urban and social structures on the edge of Venice.