Venice: Projection

from Theatres by Sugimoto

Housing & Public Space

Frame

In response to the work you have so far undertaken, design a public or private/domestic room for your chosen site.

Consider your room in the context of the built landscape of Venice. Use exploratory and considered drawings and models to develop your room's quality of space, its materiality, lightness, views, light and shadow. Consider who might occupy the room and what use the room is put to.

At this stage you should not be overly concerned with the constraints of site planning, your room should be an inceptive and ambitious design approach that draws on your intuitive response to Venice and its population, and begins to draw together ideas for your proposed programme.

You should work on site studies and individual projects simultaneously. Some of the site analysis can be done in groups (sunlight study, models, detailed survey etc) but it has to be described as such in your portfolios. All your individual project work needs to be individual.

Mies Van Der Rohe

Armature

Write a maximum of 100-150 words about your design approach. This should cover aspects of procurement strategy, identification of key users, construction logistics. This is the first draft of the strategic Whys and Hows of your proposal.

Things to consider

- choice of site
- choice of programme
- choice of third element to programme
- end-users
- management and procurement

Montage*

Use the work you have already carried out and are in the process of working on:

1. Aperture - Domestic Space/Public Space
2. Exposure - Virtual Venice, Split Sites and Simultaneous Spaces
3. The Campi of Venice

to inform your proposal, interests and ideas, and also provide material for drawings and other outputs.

* In film-making, a montage is a sequence of successive images or short shots. In photography, montage is a technique for combining separate elements into a single image, similar to collage. In both, a new meaning or whole is created that does not exist in the individual parts.

In film, light leaves its traces on the sensitive emulsion, imprinting on it permanent shadows. The manipulation of two realities - the superimposition of two stills, both traces of material realities - produces something that is already outside the logic of "realism." Rather than represent reality, it produces a new reality.
Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity

Venice: 17 - 22 November 2008

Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare by Cartier-Bresson

Monday 17 November: Arrive in Venice, meet after dinner in Campo Santa Margerita. Tuesday 18 November: Architecture Biennale. There are several pertinent exhibitions dealing with temporality, occupation, immateriality and housing: The British pavilion is showing contemporary architects working in housing in the UK and abroad and raises differences in social and economic settings. The Italian pavilion contains an exhibition called "Housing Italy: 12 projects for inhabiting and re-inhabiting the city" showing future projects, and an overview of the current situation and the legacy of Italian public housing. The Venice pavilion is exhibiting "Carlo Scarpa and the origin of things". The Polish pavilion show "The Afterlife of Buildings" questions the future use, durability and adaptability of buildings. The Irish exhibition called "the Lives of Spaces" focuses on visual narrative revealed in film and photography, and is housed in Palazzo Giustinian Lolin on the Grand Canal.

Wednesday 19 November:
Morning - Foundation Querini Stampalia, Santa Maria Formosa, Castello.
Afternoon - Il Redentore by Palladio, housing by Zucchi Architetti, Giudecca

plan of Querini Stampalia Foundation by Carlo Scarpa

Thursday 20 November: The Campi of Venice drawn survey

study of campi in two parts (work in groups):
1. Orthogonal drawings based on physical survey - plan, elevation and section. include material and detail observations.
2. Time-based study of occupation and use - this could be film-based, photographic, drawn, mapped or otherwise surveyed. you may need to combine different types of survey (activity and sunlight for instance).

Use the observations in Interaction with Architectural Space: the Campi of Venice to inform and guide your own work.
On our return to London you will give a 15 minute presentation, in your survey groups, about the text and your own surveyed observations.

1. Campo de Ghetto Novo 2. Campo de la Madonna de l'Orto 3. Campo de l'Abbazia and Campo de la Misericordia 4. Campo San Giacomo da l'Orio 5. Campo San Polo

6. Campo Santa Margherita 8. Campo San Trovaso 9. Campo Santo Stefano 10. Rialto

Friday 21 November: Site Survey

Saturday 22 November: Finish surveys and return to London

‘For an antidote to ... dehumanized places where man shows himself an unfit inhabitant of the earth, we could turn to archetypally humanized spaces like the canals and squares of Venice where even the land is built. Always cognizant of the limitations placed on them by the surrounding water, the builders of this city have contrived an integration of all its parts which gives it the deep consistency of a landscape’.
Robert Harbison,Thirteen Ways, MIT, 1997

composite photo-drawings by Andriani Plessa

hybrid drawing of imagined room and street, by Jurgita Korsakaite