Studio Details

Location
Venice, Italy

Date
29 June-10 July, 2026

Team Leaders
Michele Pasca di Magliano (Director, Zaha Hadid Architects)
Clemens Lindner (Senior Designer, Zaha Hadid Architects)

Program
Gateway to Venice (including a future mobility hub)

Field Trips and Site Visits
COMING SOON

Project

Lanterna: Designing the New Entrance to Venice
Every day, roughly 40,000 people enter Venice from the mainland – by road, rail, and water. Their first encounter with one of the world’s most extraordinary cities is a car park: the Autorimessa Comunale at Piazzale Roma, a multi-storey municipal structure built in 1934 and expanded across the following decades.

As the private car recedes from European cities and new forms of mobility – autonomous vehicles, water taxis, drone logistics – reshape how people and goods move, the logic that built this structure is becoming obsolete. What should take its place? We propose it should be a landmark. A vertical civic act that announces Venice, frames the threshold between the mainland and the lagoon, and makes the act of arrival worth remembering. We call it the Lanterna.

As the utilitarian need it was built to serve diminishes, Piazzale Roma presents one of the most charged redevelopment opportunities in Europe. It is simultaneously infrastructure and gateway – a site where architecture must do more than accommodate movement. It must define it.

The Venetian Republic suppressed private towers. Where Florence, Bologna, and San Gimignano bristled with family towers as expressions of wealth and rivalry, Venice kept its skyline deliberately horizontal – the Council of Ten understood verticality as a threat to collective civic order. The towers that survived in Venice were public and collective: the Campanile di San Marco, the parish bell towers, and – crucially – the lanterna, the lighthouse that guided ships safely across the lagoon into port. Verticality in Venice was always in service of the city, not the individual.

We will revive that tradition and design a tower on the Autorimessa Comunale site that transforms Piazzale Roma into a genuine gateway to Venice. Our proposal should simultaneously address architecture, infrastructure, civic space, and environment. The programme is not fixed – teams are expected to define and argue their own.

The following traditions are offered as design provocations, not prescriptions.

• Murano glassblowing – blown, layered, and transparent geometries; voids within solids
• Venetian Gothic tracery – filigree stone screens and the structural logic of pattern
• Terrazzo and mosaic – aggregated surface; material richness assembled from fragment
• Venetian brickwork and water foundations – piled timber-and-brick logic made legible
• Burano lace – intricate load-distributing geometry as structural net or tensile skin

Zaha Hadid Architects work at all scales and in all sectors, creating transformative cultural, corporate, residential and other spaces that work in synchronicity with their surroundings.

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Internships and Opportunities

Young designers and students accepted to join Zaha Hadid Architects at Venice Studio may be considered for available internship or job opportunities at Zaha Hadid Architects. Selection of candidates is at the sole discretion of the team leaders and Zaha Hadid Architects. Places are not guaranteed.

Program Information & Ticketing

Learn more about the program, inc., the application process and pricing here →