VENEZIA

The history of Venice appears as a non stop-vision: from Canaletto to Aldo Rossi, from Superstudio to the 10 imagines for west Canareggio, signed among the others by Moneo, Eiseman, Hejduc, all the way to the more recent projects as Ghery’s one for the new airport, exposed at the “Venezia città nuova” exhibition, or to the very recent initiative Real Venice whereby major artists have donated their creative vision to portray the change of this extraordinary city.

What it could be possibly added to this continuous sequence of imagines?

Our project originated from these considerations: instead of suggesting one vision of the future city, we have made conjectures about the construction of a big kaleidoscope able to contain all the vision of the city: the past ones, the present ones and the future ones.

That’s why in the first table the architectural object is deliberately in the background, while all the room is occupied by a collage of many city alternative visions.

The basic idea is to build a new virtual and “augmented” Venice restrained in a tower, a new “teatro del mondo” (World theater) anchored in the lagoon, in the point where Canal Grande and the Giudecca Canal virtually converge. The tower stands on a platform constituting a new field, conceived as a collective place to host outdoor shows and delimited by evanescence walls made of perforated metal panels.

The composition of the space, made of intersection of vertical and horizontal directions, is deliberately abstract. At the same time the tower, in an anti-figurative conception, is a simple parallelepiped that as it grows up to the sky, it dematerialize itself as a digital image whose pixels appear as squares when enlarging it.

As a new bell tower, it has in its highest point a belfry: an “imagines board” sliding inside the perforated metal plates that surrounds it on the four sides. By night the Venice virtual visions are projected on the screen, while, at the same time, from this level of the tower, it is possible to overlook on the real Venice.

The tower is a media building as well as a new town built in a contemporary way, where places are not connected by physical paths but they are like hub of an infrastructure network, vertical subways connecting different “virtual places” at different levels. Several video cameras, put in different places of the city, send real-time imagines to the tower. Inside the building there are digital labs where users can manipulate the environment using the virtual reality to simulate a potential architectural-urban scenario fitted on his own personal wishes. The nearly-closed space allows for intense immersion in virtual reality as well as gloves and glasses will help the construction of new urban imagines. Inside the building there are also a small conference hall and some shops.

The tower, as urban center, aims principally to promote the change and to stimulate the debate on the possible transformation of the city in a contemporary vision.

The imagines we made in our first table are deliberately provocative as well as the historicized Canaletto and the Superstudio ones, resumed inside the collage, reminds of the past famous attempts to provoke.

If, on one side, we underline the impossibility to act on Venice physical reality without upsetting the character of sites, on the other hand, we highline some issues to be faced in a more o less close future.

Can Venice find a way to face the new mobility or the energy saving issues? The insertion of contemporary architecture? Is it possible to experiment a different use of typical element of the venetian environment as the “briccole”or the “altane”?.

Beyond the provocation… possible places to think and experiment.