VENICE CITYIVISION competition: Nature and purpose of the competition If the future is gone, what past is expecting us? Try to imagine New York in its future if the manipulation of the urban context and its architectural objects, joined with its inhabitants, will be influenced by SPACE and TIME.
FIRST PRIZE - A. Bottero, S. Della Rocca, V. Bruni – G8U3F7 Venice is stolen from the lagoon. A constant struggle of men stealing fragments of ground from the water. Venetian buildings were built by establishing a precise relationship with the water: they faced the canals showing their splendor and wealth. Not merely places of transit, a substantial part of daily life was carried out on the canals and here social interactions and commercial transactions took place. The perception of the reality from water is accelerated and distorted. The meaning of travel on the water is reduced to the fastest way to move from one point to another of the city. Water as a space of transit, a neutral dimension in which to simply migrate from one place to another. In our cities we are accustomed to distinguishing spaces of transit from spaces of standing. But can a space of transit mutate into a space of standing? How can architecture manage to overturn a relation taken for granted? The concept develops around this thought and from the intention to build new scenarios of dwelling in the city, discovering a third level, that in balance between the water and the seabed. Rooms open towards the sky that float and move on the water. Rooms from which you can observe Venice from below, as if from a cradle, safe from the din coming from the canal banks. ....................................................................
SECOND PRIZE - O. Di Manno / L. Catena / F. Cusani / F. Graviglia The city appears now still in its past, crystallized in modern postcards like yesterday in Canaletto’s canvasses: not anymore suited, then, to the needs of contemporary life. What Venice misses is efficient services, modern infrastructures and a true labour market; or maybe, the same elements rendered in a version sustainable by the same city lightness. Too quickly, all of this has been sacrificed in favour of the progressive “museumalization” of Venice, without evaluating the risk of the exile of those same persons that made the city’s grandeur: the venetians. Our vision wants then to be an innocent provocation, an unusual way to re-assign the places to their inhabitants, selecting some celebrated and “sacred” examples and transforming them into contemporary works. The use of a cover skin, if on one side maintains the fundamental historical-artistic features, on the other conveys a different evocation of a contemporary city, by placing the building in a diverse aesthetic and functional reality. The only remembering will be tied to the sheer volume, symbol of a new autonomy of the building and also capable of making this new objects (such they have become) different from the their hidden underlying. info: www.cityvision.com