Studio Details

Location
Venice, Italy

Date
3-14th July, 2023
(8/9th weekend free unless notified otherwise)

Fee
2500 Euro

Studio Directors in Venice
Kersten Geers (prof. arch.), Fabrizio Ballabio (arch. phd), Guido Tesio (arch.), Jelena Pančevac (arch.)

Studio Project
Visual Research / Iconic Survey

Time Commitment
3.5hrs / day classes (+ fild trips, lectures and site visits)
*students should expect to spend additional time outside class to develop their projects

Required Skills
Digital 3D Modelling, Post-production imagery

Required Software
TBA

Resources
Laptop computer

Field Trips and Site Visits
Palazzo Ducale, Venice
Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice
Ca’ d’Oro, Venice
Fondazione Cini, Venice
Palladio Museum, Vicenza

note: The cost of all studio activities are covered by the Venice Studio program (inc. any transport), therefore there is no additional cost to students.
A week-long public transport ticket and entry ticket to the Architecture Biennale (Giardini and Arsenale) are also included.

Studio Project

Everything’s brief for the Venice Studio 2023 explores the mythology of modern Venice through a visual and iconographic research on unbuilt, twentieth-century projects for the Serenissima. As a city frozen in time due to fierce marketing impulses and politics of preservations, Venice could seem an unlikely place for carrying out a research on the cultural imaginary of the modern city. Its cohesive visual identity appears to resist any form of contemporary contamination. And its frail condition as a city built on water, accompanied by the perpetual threat of oblivion due to the rising levels of the lagoon, has limited interventions to advanced engineering endeavours and conservative restoration.

And yet, for a good 50 or so years, architects of the modern age actively engaged Venice as a testbed for warranting their positions. Unapologetically, they dealt with Venice as an extreme case in which to appraise whether approaches developed elsewhere and for contemporary urban conditions could pass the test in one of the most intricate circumstances contemporary architecture could face. From Le Corbusier’s project for a hospital in San Giobbe, to Louis Kahn’s Palazzo dei Congressi at the Giardini della Biennale to the more recent project by Gianugo Polesello for the Ponte dell’Accademia—each of these proposals was both a common sense response to the needs of the Venetian citizenry as well as an attempt to release the destiny of the Serenissima from the conservative claws of history. Following this mission, our studio will reimagine Venice by focusing on a select range of unrealised projects for the city questioning how the latter may have developed had modernity been embraced.

Much like in our studio in Mendrisio, our approach to this exercise will be as much concerned with the representation of architectural projects as it will concerned with the project of architectural representation. It treats the act of surveying as a creative and ideational act through which positions on a place (or on architecture more generally) can be expressed in visual form. Serendipitously, few places are more apt to test the possibilities of architectural representation than Venice—the subject and home place of some of the most extraordinary painters of urban vedute of the modern age, from Vittore Carpaccio to Francesco Guardi, Titian to Tintoretto. Inspired by the work of these masters – retrospective and projective at the same time – our studio will tackle the history and the possibility of the Modern Project in Venice through a collective effort in architectural imagination.

Everything

Everything is the research laboratory, teaching and publishing platform of OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen. It was founded in 2019 at the Academy of Architecture USI in Mendrisio and is run by Kersten Geers, Joris Kritis, Jelena Pančevac, Guido Tesio and Fabrizio Ballabio. Everything takes its name from Alighiero Boetti’s kaleidoscopic accumulation of figures in his seminal Tutto tapestries of the 1980s to focus on the architectural landscape Europe as it is embodied in a precise collection of cultural displays–from the past and the present, in its urban and suburban domains. Everything’s research is published yearly in academic reports as well as in ad hoc publications. Most recently, Aldo & Hannie van Eyck. Excess of Architecture (Walther & Franz König, 2023). In 2022, Everything curated the exhibition From Brussels with Love. The Production of Culture at Maniera, Brussels showcasing the work of the Diploma Students of the Academy of Architecture USI in Mendrisio (Switzerland).

|| Web link || Instagram link ||

VS23 Program Information

For Deatiled Program Information click HERE

© Venice Studio 2021-2023