The Brief

Venice is exceptional not only because its streets are filled with water.

It is also Italo Calvino’s model and collector of all possible imaginary cities. Its magic and aura infects all visitors. Its stones, as they were for John Ruskin, are a syntactical lesson for architects. Its atmosphere has a similar effect on filmmakers (Death in Venice, Don’t Look Now, or even popular TV – Donna Leone filmings). Architects who flock to the Biennale are amongst the most susceptible victims of the Venice virus. Many of us have also submitted to the temptation to tinker with the Venetian morphology (see Peter Wilson’s 1985 Ponte dell’Accademia to be explained in this studio). This studio is not about designing new bits but in making off with bits left by others.

The technique advocated is PIRACY, including raids on archives, catalogues or historic documents. Hostage taking is carried out with downloads, screenshots, sketches, etc. Each student is asked to nab a bit of architecture (or just a bit of atmosphere, a reflection, a colour) that takes their fancy. Piracy on the Adriatic between Venetians and the Ottoman (Piri Ries) has a long tradition.

Reworking/replicating/abusing the architectural hostage is what the workshop is about.

Put on your eye-patches and raise the virtual ‘Skull and Crossbones’.

Project Precinct

Venice Project

Bridgebuilding No 4. Ponte dell’Accademia

Venice Biennale of Architecture (1985)

Aldo Rossi’s choice of the bridge as the subject for the 1985 Venice Biennale competitions implied the rescue of this artefact, this type, from a specialist discipline of production (engineers), and its reconnection to a wider discourse.

Reinvestigating the bridge as a multivalent construction in a complex and layered urban situation is a very different exercise from a modernist refinement of a single unambiguous structural system – the tradition of Eiffel, c and Morandi.

Thus the replacement of the provisional Accademia Bridge in Venice provides the incentive for the invention of a contemporary and polemical status for the bridge, or more correctly, the ‘bridgebuilding’.

Unlike the Rialto Bridge (a complex overlay of street, market, public space and bridge) the two bridges which have occupied the Accademia site were unambiguous. The Austrian bridge, a nineteenth-century steel lattice structure was unpopular enough to be eventually removed. Now the temporary wooden bridge that replaced it seventy years ago has become unsound. The stones of Venice obviously have an innate resistance to newcomers.

Bridgebuilding no. 4 is a proposal for yet another alien insertion, but this time a multivalent one. It is a collaboration of two context generated end structures with tectonic spanning elements. At its extremities the new bridge reiterates the contrasting physical and functional characteristics of each bank of the Grand Canal, a contextural imbalance that precludes the possibility of a symmetrical structure.

© Bolles+Wilson

BOLLES+WILSON

BOLLES+WILSON are internationally known for a consistently high architectural quality in a wide range of projects, each an individual solution developed with careful consideration to the cultural and the urbanistic context, which it must enhance.

The program, whether cultural, residential, office, retail/entertainment, public use, or administrational is always the generator of the building form. Our philosophy is to ennoble the practical necessities and the purpose a building must serve through creative invention. Ultimately the technical, the programmatic as well as issues of sustainability must be simply and elegantly synthesised as architecture and as spaces with a distinctive and unique character.

BOLLES+WILSON are based in Germany but operate internationally with projects in Albania, Australia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and United Kingdom.

Suzuki House
Tokyo

© Ryuji Mijamoto