Walkable Architectures

Roberta Albiero + Arabella Guidotto
with Federico Muratori

AMaze is a physical and cognitive, muscular and perceptual path within the urban fabric of Venice.

An attentional journey to discover the fluid space that structures the city. A multicursal labyrinth in which to activate a Haptic experience where the body is understood as a synthesis between the low, the earth, the weight, the darkness, the compact; and the high, the air, the light, the wind, the lightness. In the face of the reduction of the repertoire of active movements, even though we move faster and faster, we witness the progressive detachment of the body from space: experimenting with an articulated and conscious interaction with the real substance of space is the objective of AMaze.

The path/journey of AMaze is structured into three exercises of interaction between the shape of the body and the built form, and the realization of a collective project: an urban game placed.

Architensions / Alessandro Orsini + Nick Roseboro
con Giona Carlotto

The gaze, which sweeps across these universes of signs, increasingly arranged like disquieting apparitions, obtains nothing from these but hermetic indications for following paths that envelop each other spirally in the depths of the impassable.
(Manfredi Tafuri, “L’éphémère est éternel. Aldo Rossi in Venice,” Domus 602, January 1980, pp. 7-11)

Venice has always been a city to be experienced in two ways due to its peculiar geography and hydrography. The first is via boat through the intricate canals and the other by walking meandering through the network of the calli, fondamenta, campi, and overpassing bridges. Venice is built on 118 small islands floating on the water of the lagoon, which define its urban complexity as depicted by Jacopo De Barbari’s bird’s eye view, already defining Venice’s exploration duality: the way of the water and the way of the calli. Some consider the act of walking a solitary activity, but moving through the city itself is a social and political act. When we walk, we merge with different people in an act that allows us to occupy public space, commune with others, express a political stance, or go from one place to another for work/labour or leisure. Work and labour are directly connected and drive society’s necessity and desire to manufacture commodities, people, and various forms of cultural production that extend our livelihoods.

Today, Venice has become the epitome of a leisure city overcrowded by tourists, fascinated by the city’s cultural heritage, the tradition of making, witnessing the magical time of the Venetian carnival, the Biennale, and the Venice Film Festival, filling the city with celebrities and paparazzi. Venice seems to fall into Guy Debord’s site for his “Society of Spectacle,” where life experiences are replaced by manufactured realities created by the consumer culture promoted by film, television, advertising, and celebrities. Debord posits that architecture and the administration of space fall into the same logic, where capitalism uses urbanism as a tool of separation. In Venice, this logic became responsible for the depopulation of residents moving inland because of the housing shortage linked to the proliferation of short-term rentals. Through the lens of leisure, Venice is a site of spectacularisation and enjoyment, brought forward while other activities are hidden in plain sight, a heterotopia. Simultaneously, Venice is imbued with elements of what Jonathan Crary calls “sites of reality”, whose heterotopic qualities lie in tourism, ritualism, and change in subjectivities, whether temporary or transitory. Following the practice of the dérive, as per Debord’s notion, we can move through this urban context, dropping our relationship with work and leisure and guided by the context’s psychogeographical variations and encounters.

This workshop explores the role of walking, moving, and advancing through contemporary Venice and how these actions can define new spaces for residents to occupy and share. It questions how differently abled bodies can experience Venice other than walking and whether the fluidity of the canals can inspire new movements and experiences. The workshop will guide students in familiarising themselves with the city, following paths, describing lines and points, searching for sounds and smells, and resting to define areas and new types of surfaces. Engaging in these activities will encourage the multiplication of spaces to foster a sense of belonging for the residents. The workshop will focus on producing critical cartographies to investigate new and old conditions and re-imagine how the calli, campi, fondamenta, and bridges can be transformed into communal resources for the residents.

Marc Barani
with Mattia Michieletto, Alessio Tamiazzo

When we approach the question of places of movement in the long term of territories and cities, we observe a paradox. The movement, which is however ephemeral, fleeting and immaterial, creates spaces which last much longer than the buildings. The void that it generates and which forms the network of roads, squares and transport infrastructures, resists urban transformations, even in the event of violent destruction, such as wars. This void is both the backbone of the urban fabric and its blood network.

If these spaces persist, it is partly because they constitute public space, the common good. They are polyfunctional and can evolve very quickly like available platforms.

The workshop proposes to question the very notion of public space in the geographical area of ​​Venice and its infrastructures.

From:
• the definition of “public” knowing that other cultures than ours do not distinguish between public and private and prefer the idea of ​​variable uses in time and space.
• the scenographic potential of these places to see the landscape differently and to activate or energize human relationships and living things.
• positions of certain artistic movements such as the “Situationist International” and its concept of psychogeography.

baukuh / Paolo Carpi + Vittorio Pizzigoni + Andrea Zanderigo
with Marianna Giannini, Fabio Santonicola

Venice is a place of festivities. A city out of this world, a realised utopia, it best represents the variety of the world itself. Public festivities are certainly the most inclusive social rituals: celebrations are always held ‘together’ with others, never in opposition to ‘others’. The great Venetian festivals, such as Carnevale and Festa del Redentore, are no exception: diversity and transgression serve to reaffirm unity and order. In these celebrations, criticism of power and its reaffirmation coexist.

Architecture has always been concerned with shaping the spaces for festivities. The design of spaces and pathways, ephemeral structures, and urban scenographies transform the city into a sort of theatre where the social ritual of the festival takes place. Architecture has always been nourished by this circularity between norm and transgression.

On 15 July 1989, on the occasion of the Festa del Redentore, Pink Floyd held a free concert in Venice, performing from a floating stage anchored in the St Mark’s basin. The concert venue was the same as that occupied just ten years earlier by the Teatro del Mondo: Aldo Rossi’s homage to this long tradition of festivals and floating pavilions. The concert brought such a large audience to Venice that it raised doubts about the city’s ability to withstand such a massive tourist influx. That year, Venice was a candidate to host the International Expo the following year, but the Pink Floyd concert highlighted the fragility of the lagoon city. It was said that Venice could not cope such a large number of tourists without suffering severe damage, and thus, for conservation purposes, it was decided to withdraw Venice’s candidacy to host the Expo.

Today, this decision seems almost ridiculous when considering how, in the following decades, Venice has been besieged by mass tourism. An assault encouraged by institutions, where voices concerned about the city’s fragility have become increasingly faint. Today, recent attempts to control access to Venice only seemingly go in the opposite direction. The new cruise terminals in Marghera, the expansion of the airport, and the new parking facilities in San Giuliano seem instead to further increase the number of tourists to the lagoon city, even imagining new less congested access routes than the current ones.

The architecture of the Festa del Redentore is the focus of study and design for the workshop. Students will work on a large drawing of the areas involved in the festivities, designing objects, places, and attractions capable of making St Mark’s Basin even more spectacular. The history of the Festa del Redentore from 1577 to the present day, and the various performances that have taken place, will enrich the catalogue of examples useful for the project.

On the first day of the workshop, each student must present an image or a plan of a festival where architecture played a primary role, printed on a horizontal A4 sheet.

Adam Brinkworth + Sofia Prantera / Aries Arise
with Marco Marino, Caterina Mattiolo, Aureliana Rizzo

This 2024 edition of Wave explores the activity of walking as a way to interact with our surroundings. Venice is a unique place more comparable to an extended museum or a theme park than a traditional city, everything in Venice is spectacle; tourists experience walking around Venice as they would an art exhibition. This workshop will explore the relatively new idea of combining commercial spaces with cultural experiences, environments, places and events, but we will be asking you to flip this concept; how can something perceived as commercial offer a worthwhile experience, one that doesn’t just rely on buying something?

Exit Through the Giftshop

We are all too familiar with the forced walk through a commercial space; whether trying to find our way out of a service station after stopping for a coffee and ending up in a maze of miscellaneous pretend local food products or travelling through an airport when we are forced through a meandering duty free path or exiting a museum giftshop where we are encouraged to buy an ever more extensive and uninspiring merchandised version of the art we just experienced or even walking through a city like Venice where mass produced versions of its famous buildings, glassware and lace works are ubiquitous. Wherever we go we are constantly bombarded by prompts and reminders to buy souvenirs of our experience.

We argue that to reverse this concept can offer a more genuine experience and a more sustainable way to grow a brand. In the new data economy where followers and visitors are becoming more valuable than purchases, what is the role of product? how do you build your community? How does a business remain sustainable? How can it be scaled? We believe that the true paradigm shifting brands are the ones that acknowledge the importance of collaboration and building genuine connections within spaces. They study their customers and understand their needs. Although still spaces for transaction, these transactions are cultural, community based and experience lead rather than purely commercial.

Aries is an example of a commercial brand that aims to subvert this relationship between commerce/art and fashion while remaining financially independent. In 2016 Aries published “Click to Buy” a play on commercial brand advertising which subverted the way branding is used in a traditional fashion image. In 2018 it collaborated with artists Jeremy Deller and photographer David Sims to create Wiltshire b4Christ an exhibition of shoppable art merchandise branded with Pagan symbols. In 2023 it opened a 400sqm store in soho that acts as a hub for events, community, exhibitions, music and library. Brinkworth designed the store to be completely modular and adaptable to different scopes and needs; everything is movable/interchangeable.

This workshop will guide to you to create a similar concept: a brand and a space where culture, experience and product merge seamlessly, where what is for sale is just as important as what you experience and more poignantly a place where you are invited to stay and which is kept sustainable through the sale of product. With our support you will be asked to create a brand which sells any type of product (alcohol, CBD, Coffee, Chocolate, etc. ) and to design and make its innovative merchandise and the space in which is housed. During the 3 weeks you will design a logo and concept for your brand, make a product and merchandise, find an innovative way to display your goods and design the space in which is housed, crucially the space should also offer a memorable experience; music, art, entertainment.

Francesco Careri / Stalker – UniRomaTre
with ETICity, Edoardo Fabbri, Simone Lavezzaro, Alberto Marzo, Sara Monaco

In 1959 the Situationist International planned an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam entitled Die Welt als Labyrinth / The World as Labyrinth, a collective work conceived as a single labyrinthine environment that ran through the museum from outside to inside. The public entered freely “as a guarantee of non-subjugation to museum optics” through a large hole in the wall like a breach to be climbed over, and from here began a path with one-way doors, the length of which could vary from 200 meters to 3 kilometres depending on the doors that opened, while the ceiling varied continuously to a height of almost a meter. The indoor atmosphere was a mixture of domestic interiors and urban exteriors, with rains, winds, artificial fogs, light, heat and sound effects, along with real obstacles that disoriented spectators who would have to get lost by constructing their own paths. The exhibition did not take place due to disputes with the museum director, who for safety reasons had interfered with the creation of the labyrinth by putting it under the supervision of the fire department. The group voted unanimously to cancel the exhibition.

As a tribute to the unrealized exhibition of the Situationists, we propose to explore the labyrinth of Venice by getting lost through the theory of the dérive, questioning what the word walkability means in a city that is many times excluding, not only for those without physical abilities but also for those without documents, citizenship or simply income. By walking we will choose places in which we will design and partly realize, a labyrinthine space capable of narrating the walkability of Venice. The course is divided into three weeks: in the first week in the morning there will be theoretical lectures on the relationship between nomadism walking and architecture, in the afternoon we will go walking in the urban spaces of the historic lagoon centre, and of the mainland of Mestre and Marghera, with the aim of stumbling upon a project. In the second week we will go back to stay in the chosen places to imagine and design the project in situ, if possible together with the people who everyday use those spaces. In the third week, with a view to the final exhibition, we will try to realize at least part of the project, installing it in situ with the inhabitants, and finally representing it through the means of art and architecture in the spaces of the IUAV. Group projects of up to three people are allowed.

More info about Situationists and the professor’s approach on: www.articiviche.blogspot.com

Armando Dal Fabbro + Vincenzo d’Abramo + Claretta Mazzonetto
with Hui Li

Philadelphia Tomorrow is the proposed title for the WAVe 2024 workshop experience. The pretext starts from an attempt to try to suggest a new vision of Philadelphia’s eastern waterfront in relation to its Downtown, that is, the recognizable layout of the founding city, conceived and designed by William Penn in 1682.

Philadelphia’s territory and design are strongly characterized by the presence of the two rivers that lap its edges and define its extent: the Delaware, which divides Pennsylvania from New Jersey, and the Schuylkill, a tributary thereof. Between the two rivers, Downtown still remains the urban, cultural, and social hub of its residents, even as the city’s development has led it to expand westward, across the Schuylkill, with the important development of the University of Pennsylvania’s college campus, and southward, defining new residential areas and a new river port.

It was the construction of this new southern dock in the city that led over time to a gradual abandonment of the old harbour area to the east on the Delaware, where central Market Street from Philadelphia City Hall led to the popular harbour districts, some of which can still be seen today, although transformed and redeveloped, and to the pier area. Sporadic traces of this harbour character remain today, with the docks and malls overlooking the great river, and a discrete and accurate attempt to regenerate this area, but they do not take into account an overall design that considers the river area and its relationship to Downtown. In addition, the presence of a major highway artery running parallel to the Delaware River – I-95, which connects the entire U.S. East Coast, linking New-York and Washington, among other cities – has completely cut through the pier area, separating it figuratively and spatially from the city.

However, the development and idea of an alternative city is possible. First, by taking up the two great plans for Philadelphia of the 1960s: one by Louis Kahn, drawn up in ’61-’62, and then Edmund Bacon’s 1967 plan, which was partly realized, and which later flowed into the important study and work on city building and space in the book Design of City.

The two projects, which are different and complementary, highlight the possibility of building a city with an alternative development to the current one, especially by rethinking the relationship between mechanized infrastructure and pedestrian spaces, to the definition of what Louis Kahn called «urban harbours», which would separate the mobility of major automobile arteries to the city of pedestrians. The two projects, in fact, move in a common direction: that of defining the ancient founding city almost as an insula, where the infrastructural theme was not an attempt to separate areas of the city, but an opportunity to rethink urban connections and the enjoyment of the city’s significant places: the long park of Independence Hall, the garden squares, the central City Hall, and the relationship between the city and its two rivers.

The work that we would like to do with students, therefore, is to study a project for a human-scale city, where the relationship between Downtown and the two rivers returns to be a central theme, alternative to the development of the city of cars and infrastructure, a project that looks retrospectively but with a vision for the city’s future at the four founding garden squares – Washington Square, Rittenhouse Square, Franklin Square, and Logan Square open to the Philadelphia Museum of Art – as places to create long views of the water, away from street noise and vertical perspectives. A city that reconsiders its views and spaces, starting with the elements that over time have defined its compositional structure and intrinsic quality in the relationship between geometry and natural structures.

Bibliography
Edmund Bacon, Design of City, The Viking press, New York, 1967.
Heinz Ronner, Sharad Jhaveri, Louis I. Kahn. Complete work 1935-1974, Birkhauser, Basel, Boston 1977.
Louis I. Kahn, Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia, in «Perspecta», n. 2, 1953, pp. 10-27.

Fernanda De Maio + Alessandro De Savi + Vittoria Sarto + Alessia Scudella
with Elena Marchiori

In the 1950s, an (American) book and an (Italian) film put the road at the center of the story. Whether it is America or Italy, the streets along which Jack Kerouac’s story – On the Road, 1951 – and Federico Fellini’s film – La Strada, 1954 – move are the symbol of nomadism and wandering. It matters little that the first story takes place from one point to another of the vast continent of American cities and landscapes by car, hitchhiking or on the famous Greyhound buses, while wandering through the cities and landscapes of central Italy, still devastated by the effects of destructions of World War II in Fellini’s roadmovie, whether on foot or in Zampanò’s ramshackle van; the roads described by these works are ordinary and banal ones understood as pure infrastructure. What matters about these paths is the occasional unplanned life that takes place there and the contexts they pass through.

Other streets in other cities take on very different roles, they are worth in themselves, as real architecture, they are the result of thoughts and projects of architects who tend to make the public void urban or extra-urban and the experience of walking and life every day that takes place a memorable event for the architectural quality they create. This course turns its attention to these streets and the intertwining of streets, ramps, stairways and squares that structure a certain way of moving within cities and landscapes, in a time varying between two and thirty minutes.   In particular, walking will be investigated in three ways: walking on level ground as happens in the porticoes of Bologna, born from something that today we will define as “building abuse” and which starting from 2021 are part of the UNESCO world heritage site, or in the Passages that innervate Paris; walking obliquely to gain altitude, of which we find excellent examples in Rome with the steps of Trinità dei Monti and the Cordonate; walking at high altitude as happens in Florence in the Uffizi | Vasari corridor system. Details of these memorable pedestrian streets will be provided by the teaching staff so that students can reconstruct, through sectional redrawings and isometric exploded views as well as scale models, the architectural and compositional characteristics of these paths, in order to understand how compositional rhythms, geometries and materials construct the street’s architecture and characterize the historic and contemporary pedestrian city.

Bibliography
Jack Kerouac, sulla strada, Mondadori, 2016.
Walter Benjamin, Parigi capitale del XIX secolo, Einaudi 1986.
Jane Jacobs, Vita e morte delle grandi città. Saggio sulle metropoli americane, Einaudi 2009.
Clarence Perry, L’unità di vicinato (1929), brani tradotti in  http://www.cittaconquistatrice.it/lunita-di-vicinato-1929/

franzosomarinelli / Mirko Franzoso + Mauro Marinelli
with Tiziano Deromedi, Filippo Ferro, Guillermo Sánchez Cárdenas, Kevin Santus

The paths that cross a meadow are both the place where one walks and the very product of walking. They are the effect and reason for their being walked. They are the children of steps, built by the rubbing of shoes on grass, gravel, earth, foot after foot as in Richard Long’s 1967 work A Line Made by Walking. Steps are thus the minimal unit of walking understood as a bodily experience but also as a transformative physical practice.

Venice is a walked place, where almost only feet plough the ground with ritual regularity. The ground of Venice, a multiple and rich place, bears the minute and sometimes indistinguishable marks of everyday steps, a rhythmic mechanical action that imperceptibly but tirelessly transforms the stones, earth, bricks, sand and grass of Venice.

These everyday marks are, however, more difficult to recognise than those that walking imprints on an expanse of grass: they are small gaps on the steps of bridges, imperceptible curves on white stones and shiny haloes on dark stones, missing scratches and splinters on wooden walkways, small chasms or large depressions in the bricks of courtyards, and shiny softenings of the precise edges of church mosaics. A constant transformation that reminds us, with relief, that Venice is not and never will be a museum: no display case, be it physical or metaphorical, will ever be able to remove the physical contact between people and objects as long as the ground is caressed by even a single pair of feet.

The ground constitutes the place of inevitable physical contact between people and things and, with fragile precision, tirelessly records the traces of this relationship of mutual encounter and continuous micro-transformation.

We wish to propose a poetic and physical account of this daily transformation where anyone walking in Venice, beyond metaphors, is a transforming agent of the city in a bodily relationship that sees both the soles of our shoes and the city consumed in a loving and daily exchange.

We want to read the city as a great artefact that keeps track of people’s paths, where walking is read as a personal bodily experience and at the same time as a physical practice of transforming the architecture and things of the city.

In search of the best way to recount this continuous rewriting of the city, with attention and care for what is there and what is no longer, we will embark on small, adventurous odysseys through the Venice of today and tomorrow, proceeding strictly step by step.

Antonella Gallo + Claudia Cavallo + Susanna Campeotto
with Matteo Isacco

For a place to exist and be recognised, it must be sung about, says Bruce Chatwin in his The Songlines. Walking around Ljubljana, it is impossible not to be seduced by the ‘songs’ rising from the urban arrangements created by Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik.

Walking as a pleasure and as a knowledge tool for designing urban space was familiar to Plečnik. A tireless walker, the architect who transformed Ljubljana into a capital city had a visceral and direct connection to the city he designed and knew as well as Eliot that «it is the journey, not the destination, that counts». Hence, too, probably a certain attitude of his to interpret the construction of a road, a street, a bridge, as an opportunity to reinvent the city, its relationships, its history, and with it the lives of those who live it daily.  Storytelling is the essence of Plečnik’s work. «In Plečnik, the relationship with function is not opposed to the fulfilment of function itself nor to the concept of economy. […] What he rejects is the reduction of the work to a simple system of performance, devoid of a conception that transcends it: and this, of course, also implies history».  For him, a bridge is not just a technical solution for crossing a river, just as embankments or a dam are not just engineering works, and a road is not just a connecting infrastructure. In Plečnik’s architecture, not only infrastructure, but also greenery, a pavement, a constraint, in short everything «that quantitative town planning expresses with the ‘standard’, becomes a fable, poetry».

His idea of the city as an artefact in constant becoming and never finished, composed of different parts to be enhanced and interpreted, is one of the most topical aspects of his work, as is his extraordinary ability to ‘invent’ opportunities, to waste nothing in obedience to a principle of «making the place» that in him represents «the extension to urban space of the principle of living».  In his ‘urban regenerations’, the notions of ‘environment’, ‘place’, ‘scale’, retain all their complexity, oriented as they are to unveiling the potential of the place to transmit and accommodate ‘stories’, potentialities that must be invented, sought out starting from an ‘individual awareness’ that takes on the task of giving expression to a ‘collective imaginary’.

Plečnik was known to tell his students: «No task, even the smallest, should be unworthy of the architect’s love». His designs for the river promenade in Ljubljana, as well as bridges, squares, paving, balconies, balustrades, small kiosks and even street lamps, are clear evidence of this principle.

Jože Plečnik’s work in Ljubljana, precisely in relation to the general theme proposed by Wave 2024, represents an architectural lesson rich in operational suggestions and, in many ways, extremely contemporary. For this reason, in order to better understand how Plečnik built the places of this city, during the intensive seminar we will explore Ljubljana in order to deepen our understanding of the architectural and urban principles he applied in the design of the Slovenian capital, analysing and interpreting with drawings and models some of his many significant works.

Bibliography
Boris Podrecca, Jože Plečnik, in «Casabella», n. 476-477, Milano 1982, pp. 96-103.
Luciano Semerani, “Il futuro del mito”, in L’Esperienza del Simbolo, Napoli 2007, pp. 25-30.
Luciano Semerani, “La costruzione del desiderio”, in Incontri e Lezioni. Attrazione e contrasto tra le forme, Napoli 2013, pp. 88-98.

José Paulo Gouvêa + Javier Mendiondo
with Davide Bergo, Anna Ghiraldini, Tommaso Spagnolli

Indians jump from a tree into the water and look for each other underwater.
(Florian Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, 2010)

In Tristes trópicos, Claude Lévi-Strauss indicates that in that inhabited America that he visited on his trip in 1935 there was a dialectic between two dimensions of that nature: one mercilessly subdued and another that, based on a defiant cohabitation, slowly and incessantly becomes a category of landscape “not wild, but misplaced”. He describes how in São Paulo two small rivers, the Anhangabaú and the Tamanduateí, make up the Tietê that after a long journey empties into the sea, crossing the Paraná River basin in Argentina.

That powerful capacity that water has to link, challenging limits, emerges in our contemporaneity as an object of study that we must investigate and project. In these borders and limits of territories there is a glimpsed space to give rise to invention and creativity. Paulo Mendes da Rocha asserted that “Water has no borders: not dimensioning it in the occupation of territory is such an American issue, an arbitrariness. Now that we understand the phenomenological issue of nature we can say that this division no longer interests us. We have to share projects in order to reverse the path of disaster that colonialism established. This is a very American question; not as a variant, but it seems to me exactly the foundation of architecture”.

The graphic chronicles of Florián Paucke, a Jesuit missionary who during the 18th century recorded the way of inhabiting the geography of the Paraná basin, produce a reflective impact on us that we must know how to interpret. The challenge of these narratives lies in the ability to record not only the physical components of these riverine edges, but fundamentally the way of inhabiting them, the way of producing and appropriating those alluvial edges.

The city, as an object of study and planning, is usually subordinated to the fleeting and large-scale view. But the human experience – on foot – is relegated and little explored as a space to think and imagine a new way of inhabiting it.

The idea of ​​looking at the edges of cities while we walk allows us to rediscover nearby, but invisible, landscapes. A way of questioning what is close to us, but at the same time difficult to understand. A different perspective that allows us to highlight unseen aspects. Water, from the beginning of cities, functioned as an infrastructure that was the axis of both territorial and socio-economic growth of territories and societies. The different political-economic processes that followed tended to unbalance this relationship, turning our rivers into a limit that led to the division of both banks. This barrier, along with other large infrastructures, fragmented the territory into center – periphery or civilization – barbarism. These processes generated the social ‘disappropriation’ of the rivers and streams that cross urban geographies, losing the perspective of water as a productive, infrastructural, landscape, recreational, ecological resource, turning it into a focus of oblivion and abandonment.

Projecting in hybrid territories between land and water is a challenge of our time and our geographical space. The context of appropriation and conflict to project the South American geography finds an additional opportunity in the pedestrian area. The water, the riparian landscape and the wetlands became the very material of the territory and architecture project.

Bibliography
Levi Strauss, C. 1955. Tristes Tropiques. Paris : Librarie Plon.
Mendes da Rocha, P. “Conferenza nell’auditorium della UNL”. In Revista Polis, 13, 12. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Santa Fe (Argentina) 2009

Patrizia Montini Zimolo + Camilla Donantoni
with Francesco Chiacchiera

It cannot be demonstrated, yet I believe it: in the world there are places where an arrival or departure is mysteriously multiplied by the feelings of those who have arrived in the same place or left from there…
(Cees Nootheboom, Verso Santiago, Feltrinelli, Milano 2005)

Starting point of our walk is the archaeological site of Hadrian’s Villa, a place where the construction wisdom, the coherence of means, techniques and materials appear in full evidence. Although it presents itself today as “a great architectural lesson” in the open air with a unique architectural heritage, it seems to have lost, over time, a relationship with the landscape and the surrounding environment. The great tradition of the Villas of Tivoli is in this sense the most explicit and direct reference. The experiences of Villa Gregoriana, Villa D’Este and Hadrian’s Villa itself show the relevance of a unique way of conceiving architecture and the scenography of the landscape, whether natural or artificial. The fulfilment of an archaeological walk cannot then forget that the entire Villa is soil, that the design of the new paths mark a movement in space and time, along which the maze of memory emerges, the interweaving of colors, words and stories.

Step by step, among the ruins and existing spaces along the perimeter of the Villa, different paths are born to renew the spectacle of architecture and archaeology, of greenery and water united in a close relationship of complementarity which not only gave origin to some of the most important architectural episodes that make up the site – Piazza d’Oro, Maritime Theatre, Canopus, Pecile and Large and Small Baths – but which is at the very basis of the choice to build. The objective of greater protection of the villa in its relationship with its territory, the Aniene river, the Horti Hadriani, pushes us to rethink the reorganization of the access system, paths, new parterres and terraces.

The need to revive the Villa beyond the short time of a tourist visit then leads to dealing with the use of some ruins/architectures that are part of the archaeological site, such as the Greek Theatre, the Temple of Venus, the Praetorium and the “One Hundred Chambers”, developing a set of new spaces for rest and meeting, for culture and free time, found near the existing ruins. New points of interest incorporate the territory that surrounds them and are incorporated by it, such as small architectures, promenades, miradors, ramps, but also open-air theatres, rooms, patios, water tanks, paths that lead inside and outside the Villa. Small architectures, as we were saying, in the logic of the fragment as an imperative design approach, the large/small dichotomy shifts the debate to the modalities of the old/new relationship.

The first requirement of the project figures is to keep the old and the new together, that is to conserve while innovating, experimenting with the need for a profound connection between the architectural and landscape scale. No intervention, no architecture has any sense of the natural or artificial landscape that is, if it does not dialogue with what pre-exists and with what will be there. In this case, an analysis of the artificial place can only be one with its relationship with the natural environment as an element characterizing the built environment and its spaces, as an immaterial and evoked material.

A visit to Hadrian’s Villa is planned for the weekend of 5-7 July, to prepare exhibition materials.

Guido Morpurgo + Enrico Miglietta

Dream and myth are in the experience of modernism design linked to the new concept of perception walks, itineraries in the built environment that characterise the manifesto-architectures conceived by the Masters. Ramps, stairs and suspended walkways are volumetric events that remeasure habitable spaces and shape the emotional experience of architectural crossing by means of new settlement models: from the machines à habiter demonstratively grafted into the urban body, to the white rationalist shells, visions of alternative spatialities to the historical city.

Le Corbusier’s promenades architecturales dissect his buildings, offering perceptions of unprecedented dimensions of living, through the space-time of modernity; the dematerialisation of the scale of Chareau’s Maison de Verre subtends a different depth of the domestic interior; the aerial footbridges of Terragni’s Casa Rustici sublimate the rationalist frame into suspended images; Albini’s octagonal and elliptical staircases shift the perception of architectural space into a dimension devoid of gravity; Kahn’s ineffable staircase – the result of the encounter between circle and triangle – reunites form, structure and space with archetypes.

The relationship between form and vertigo inherent in the spatiality of the modernity therefore represents the quintessence of 20th century architecture: measuring habitable space through new principles that reconfigure the experience of architecture in the emotional dimension of movement.

Despite the fact that Venice coincides with the image of the ancient city, the principle of the promenade of perception is intimately linked to its very form, contended between constancy and change.

The paradox of Venice as a ‘city of the new modernity’ actually finds correspondence in the experiments of architects who have interpreted its essence as an immense promenade architecturale to elaborate unprecedented projects. Like the hospital imagined by Le Corbusier, a building-textile based on the principle of reciprocity between calli and campi. Just as the bridge building – architecture-path par excellence – designed by Kahn for a Congress Palace at the Arsenale is the interpretative form of the Venetian connective principle. The interior/exterior spaces of Scarpa’s Querini Stampalia rework as a sequence of fragments the surprises and discontinuities that Venice always offers to those who travel through it.

The models of the modern can thus be reinterpreted thanks to the comparison with a great Venetian Renaissance space-pathway, through a ‘full-scale’ design exercise of particular significance and utility.

Didactic Ends

The workshop proposes to design an exhibition that interprets the paradoxical modernity of Venice – ideally summarised in the interior space of Sansovino’s Scuola Grande della Misericordia – through the display of models and drawings of the manifesto architecture of the modernism and contemporary declinations of walkable architectures.

The exhibition will be represented with a general model, variants and details at scales close to the dimensional and constructive reality of a walkable architecture. The exercise is thus proposed to the students with realistic connotations, thanks to the dialogue with a historical building of particular relevance.

The final exhibition of the work will itself be an ‘exhibition of the exhibition’.

Articulation of the workshop

The workshop – which includes a visit to the Scuola Grande della Misericordia and a lecture by Prof. Jacques Gubler on the theme Motion, Émotions – consists of 3 phases:
Week I • The form of presentation: knowing, designing, representing
Week II • Detail Strategies: the part for the whole
Week III • The exhibition of the exhibition: assembly

Expected deliverables
• general sectional maquette of the exhibition, 1:20
• study maquettes of variants, 1:20
• detail maquettes, 1:10
• design and realisation of the final exhibition layout

e[ad] Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseño, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso
/ Rodrigo Saavedra + Iván Ivelic + Anna Braghini + Manuel Sanfuentes

el camino no es el camino
(Amereida)

When we refer to the action of walking, we can think of displacement, of travel and bifurcations, and also in the more wandering and vagabond sense, we can perceive a position in transit and changeable… without a support plane. From this consideration, we propose addressing the architectural problem of place in its utopian variant, which gives rise to a way of conceiving living in its poetic condition.

In the context of the School of Valparaíso, Amereida, and the Open City, the place becomes a space without property and according to the principle of hospitality the inhabitant is transformed into a guest. This is how walking, and in particular pilgrimage and its stages or stations, broadens the view of the territory, which in our case coincides with the American continent, which we can conceive of as an oriented extension that has its north in the south.

With this in mind, the workshop proposes an architectural space for the act of ‘going on the move’ and to explore new ways of inhabiting moving in order to find new forms that give rise to this act. The architectural exploration will take place in a creative process from observation to form creation. This process will be organized temporally in three moments:

Moments of observation and speaking

Observation uncovers and reveals the qualities of inhabiting a place and is realized through drawings, sketches and notes about what one is watching. It is an experience with the place, leading us to move and pause to draw in order to discover, through the body, the act that is being observed. This way of contemplating what surrounds us will also make use of the use of words and language, coming to give a name to what is being observed. Perhaps this is precisely the reason that leads us to listen to poetry, so that its song can ‘give us a course’.

Moment of spatial exploration

Through the word discovered and written down during the observation, three-dimensional space fields are created at different scales, to define the shape of the space that gives rise to the act or action. This process makes it possible to define a quality of place that represents a possibility for architecture. In this stage, places will be proposed where interventions in the territory can be realized.

Moment of designing the space and its representation

Once the places and spaces have been defined, we will devote ourselves to their graphic representation to show the results of the observation-act- space relationship.

Poetry and architecture will be the two dimensions that will be explored to give form to human habitation, be it a house or a simple shelter for the pilgrim. All forms arise from the observation of what is in front of us, and even in the relationship between Europe and America there is also a passage that has been perceived by multiple and even unknown ways of approaching; this workshop is another way of giving form to this way of moving from one place to another.

Margherita Vanore
with Giacomo Bodo, Leandro Esposito

The design theme around which the Lagoon City Promenade workshop works is to transform the edges of a road infrastructure into a series of ecosystemic and multifunctional spaces that accommodate the promenade and qualify themselves in relation to the landscape.

The island city of Venice in its different parts declines multiple conditions and characters of open space in relation to pedestrian mobility, collective activities and landscape values.

Where the urban quality of the historic city is broken and infrastructure systems for the exclusive use of transport are imposed, the anomaly of walking is also emphasized.

In particular, the workshop program identifies the case study between the water city and the mainland at the southwestern edge of the translagoon bridge. The ponte della Libertà (it means “Freedom” bridge) – an essential infrastructure for Venice – ensures the necessary separation of the different modes of transport: rail, road (also used by the tram), while the bicycle and pedestrian routes present various criticalities and limitations.

The history of the bridge is also a story of progressive flanking, integration and adaptation to the technical needs of vehicular mobility. The railroad bridge, built between 1841 and 1845 according to a design by Tommaso Meduna, was flanked by the road bridge, built in only 18 months according to a design by Eugenio Miozzi and inaugurated in 1933. After the 1970s, new tracks were added to the railway section, increasing the number of lines to four. The road bridge now houses two separate roadways, with two lanes in each direction. The tram line is integrated into one of the lanes. On both sides of the roadways are service sidewalks and on the south front a forced bicycle-pedestrian connection to piazzale Roma.

Born as a railway infrastructure and flanked by the road infrastructure, the ponte della Libertà is hardly practicable as a pedestrian path, both because it is on the edge of an infrastructural canal, and because of the lack of intermediate resting places and the difficult environmental conditions. In addition, its lenght of almost four kilometres across water connect two areas marked by road junctions, which, if suitably redesigned, could provide access to a wide promenade between the two parts of the water city. This distance is indeed suitable for walking, if it is imagined in a linear park, where the sequence of places can ensure an urban value in the spatial and environmental conditions, adequate to the needs of service to people, as well as adaptation and resilience for a decisive part of the lagoon landscape.

In this context, the design study for the southwest front of the ponte della Libertà, between piazzale Roma and forte Marghera, aims to define a redevelopment proposal to promote its walkability. Promenade, resting places, green areas and services to support the enjoyment of the path will adapt to accommodate the pleasure of walking along a waterfront, but also a new infrastructure of urban well-being, stretched between the different parts of the lagoon city, to reduce their separation and alterity, contributing to reduce polluting factors.

The work will follow three distinct phases in order to:
• Describe the current state of the bridge and the environmental and landscape conditions;
• To formulate a multi-functional program in relation to the characters of the route and the landscape of the lagoon;
• Prefigure adaptive action strategies with design solutions for the promenade and its places.

weber+winterle / Lorenzo Weber + Alberto Winterle
with Marco Santoni, Martino Stelzer, Marta Tonelli

Il camminare presuppone che a ogni passo il mondo cambi in qualche suo aspetto e pure che qualcosa cambi in noi.
(Italo Calvino, Collezione di sabbia, 2023 [1984])

In 1967, Richard Long created a work by photographing the trace imprinted on a lawn, created by the simple passage of a person on foot. A line, temporary and ephemeral, that represents the degree zero of the transformation of the landscape. A physical action that modifies a place, only for a limited time, without building anything.

In 1984, James Stirling inaugurated the new Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, an innovative public, and at the same time urban, project in which a city pedestrian path crosses the open space of a gallery courtyard. The rigid circular shape of the courtyard around which the building is constructed is contaminated by the passage of people passing through the city, allowing for crossings of functions and gazes. A monumental project on an urban scale where on different layers are placed paths and spaces, closed and open, which interpenetrate and feed off each other.

These are two extreme and opposite approaches, on the one hand a spontaneous action that leaves a momentary sign of its passage, and on the other a constructed, physical path. However, both are projects, artistic and architectural, where it is the path that gives the measure of the physical space. The human dimension becomes the scale of reference of the path, whether it is free in an uncontaminated territory or inserted in a complex context where it can touch places, build relationships, allow new views to be discovered.

Starting from these two possible different attitudes, let us imagine a new urban route that touches and crosses the island of Giudecca. The island contrasts a clear built front, facing the canal of the same name towards the city of Venice, with a partly fringed and undefined front towards the lagoon. If, therefore, the main route consists of the space and the all-walkable edge of the fondamenta, on the opposite front there is no route that follows the course of the island, but only a comb-like system of penetration. The ‘back of Giudecca consisting of an alternation of different ‘urban materials’ offers interesting opportunities for use and interpretation. The succession of built spaces made out of dwellings, warehouses, boatyards, or of open spaces, becomes an opportunity to experiment with different modes of intervention, giving continuity to changing spatial conformations. The route can also extend to the island’s offshoots, joining the island of San Giorgio to the east and Sacca Fisola and Sacca San Biagio to the west. The horizontal route connects places, crosses buildings, extends over the water, while at the same time the possible vertical movement offers unusual views, uncovering or denying the view of the city.

Even the space of the classroom hosting the exercise becomes a place of design, like a new island to be annexed to the Giudecca, where the theme of the path takes on a symbolic but also physical significance, becoming part of the new, unusual paths through the architecture and landscape of Venice.