BigMat Award 2017, National

Gold Medal of Italian Architecture 2012, Special Prize

In Pursuit of Architecture, Log + MoMA, 2012

The text was published in <<Log>> n. 29, 2013

Law Court Offices in Venice 

Venice has no ground to be inscribed. As Carl Schmitt poetically writes, unlike the earth, which is “written” through the topographies of cultural activity and where products and rights are returned, the water, though bearing fruits, cannot be inscribed by ships, which leave no trace of their passage.

 

Venice is a territory constantly undergoing a process of writing and erasure in a continuous battle between human civilizations and the tide. In this condition of uncertainty, Venice has often been resistant to modernity. As Manfredo Tafuri writes in Venice and the Renaissance, “Venice is a problem for the ‘moderns.’ Fascinated by a crystallized continuity, which has been mistaken for banal organic unity – perhaps to be regained – they cannot tolerate the challenge that Venice hurls out to them. And they multiply their violent and faithless attempts, with sadistic traits that are barely hidden beneath the masks of phrases like ‘respectful project,’ ‘the past as friend,’ and the ‘new Caprice’ – masks of mummification of ephemeral revitalization.”

 

Venice is resistant to action as a final solution. Action here can only be an open-ended process of transformation. We reinterpret this resistance as a strategy that allows us to infiltrate the city while preserving the character of instability. Understanding all landscapes as constantly undergoing transformation, each of our projects aims to unpack the complexities of their environments through architecture – a process we call TranslationArchitecture.

 

In this sense, architects are the translators of context. Edouard Glissant writes that the translator necessarily invents a language which is common between two different idioms but is in some way unpredictable for both. The architect acts similarly, choosing the context to translate and presenting it in another form and time through the invention of a language that is both necessary and unforeseeable. TranslationArchitecture is a contemporary, continuous, and vital transformation of context. The LCV project exemplifies this approach.

 

Questioning the given site and program during the competition phase, in which architects were expected to work only on the adaptive reuse of a series of 19th-century buildings within an abandoned tobacco factory, we decided to introduce a new building. We designed a physical adapter in a unique, leftover open space in the dense urban landscape of Piazzale Roma. 

 

We chose (and played with) the word adapter to signify a physical configuration of a translation. The word is composed of two syllables: ad and apt. We interpret apt as a soft technological element, an infrastructure necessary for a dialogue between incompatible systems. This allows connections and creates understanding without threatening the identity of each system. Ad is understood as both an addition and an advertisement, related to communication and manipulation. 

 

LCV aims to be an adapter between programs, scales, typologies, and, from a broader perspective, between historical memory and the contemporary. While its scale is based on the huge void of Piazzale Roma, which is the car entrance to the city, and the Grand Canal, spanned here by Santiago Calatrava’s bridge, LCV responds to the dense Venetian urban system beyond the plaza. The new program proposes a hybrid typology: a building housing the law-court offices; an infrastructure housing the technological systems that form the top of LCV and will eventually serve the entire rehabilitated factory complex; and an interior piazza, a seven-story-high public entrance hall for the new system of public spaces that the restoration of the complex will return to the city.

 

The introduction of a five-foot-wide technical space between the facade and the interior allowed us to work with light, which in Venice is always scattered by the water. Through a soft technical solution, whereby the small exterior perforations become more generous windows on the interior, the seven-story atrium space changes with every moment’s light and climatic condition, activating the building as much as its users do. The interior space, while supporting the different programs, is perceived as a teza, a typical Venetian void space between two parallel structural walls and covered by a pitched roof. The teza is a stereometrically simple volume with various uses, including housing, storage, and boat parking.

 

The typological and scalar manipulation of the building is as substantial as our introduction of a new hybrid program. Sited at the end of a series of 19th-century tezas that face Piazzale Roma, LCV is a contemporary teza that connects the scale of the nearby multistory parking garages to the smaller scale of the urban texture. The compact shape of the new volume was stretched in length and height and inserted into the thin space between the historic buildings and the parking garages. On Piazzale Roma, a 16-foot-deep cantiliver that draws pedestrians inside also becomes a counterpoint to the Calatrava bridge, visually connecting the regained industrial site to the Grand Canal.

 

LCV is clad in pre-oxidized copper, which in Venice distinguishes institutional buildings. The building’s surface thus instigates the action of time in architecture. We don’t know if or when oxidation will turn the building the green color of the vaults that punctuate the Venetian horizon, but it is yet another translation, one that suspends LCV between the historical and the contemporary. – Carlo Cappai and Maria Alessandra Segantini