Marine Science Station, Aqaba Jordan

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room O1

The Gulf of Aqaba (GOA) is unique as it contains a significant percentage of the world’s natural marine biodiversity. This unique environment is potentially vulnerable to pollution particularly at its northern tip. One of the major activities affecting the environment of the gulf is the man-made desalination plants that abstract sea water and dispose of desalinated brine.

The Aqaba Special Economic Zone (ASEZ) covers an area of 65 square kilometers, extending along the entire 27 kilometer Red Sea Coast of Jordan. Creating a strong sense of regional identity, character, quality and attraction for Aqaba requires coordination of exterior design throughout the ASEZA. The design criteria given in these guidelines provide parameters for site planning, architecture, landscaping, lighting, signing and maintenance that must be followed by each project to ensure this design coordination.

The Marine Science Station (MSS) was founded in the mid-1970s as an inter-university research institute (The University of Jordan and Yarmouk University). One of the main objectives of establishing the MSS was to create a marine research facility for scientists and post graduate students. The plot size of the station is around 35.000 square meters. The buildings were all built in modest size, scattered, and contain: laboratories, a marine biology exhibition, administration offices, a fish farming unity, a diving unity, a boat unity with two marine slides, researchers’ offices, public health facilities for visitors, a library, a small restaurant, and a car parking. Different surveys and meetings with public administrators and locals in Aqaba suggested a radical change to the space as it has become unsuitable for the expected real needs, especially the aquarium, the only one in all Jordan.

According to specialized studies tidal currents and water levels in the Gulf of Aqaba show strongly the effects of remote forcing. Water levels reflect remote forcing, with annual variations in sea surface height in the Gulf driven by wind-induced setup in the main part of the Red Sea, although winds on the Gulf itself are also important. The preferred long-term defense against storm tide effects on new communities is avoidance of the risk through land use planning. However, where communities are already established in areas of storm tide risk, flood resilient design and construction can limit the long-term costs for home owners by reducing expected costs associated with flood damage and insurance premiums.

The new project will suggest a new Science Marine station that considered the current and suggested spaces by simulating the real need of Aqaba and the region, and it should include a distinct aquarium that reflects the real wealth of the Red Sea and a suitable place for Jordanians to enjoy the beauty of the marine life that lies there.

As Aqaba is considered as an extension of the Jordan Valley “the region with the highest temperature in the country”, the proposed project will highlight design concepts and approaches that can be considered for mitigating risk related to the warming climate, including increased temperatures and more frequent extremes of hot and cold. They are presented here in the hope that students will expand on these solutions and tailor them to local conditions.

S.L.O.W.* _Covenants for a more than human coexistence in the lagoons of El Mar Menor and Venice (* Silent, Lingering, Other, Wave) 

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room E

Sometimes, what humans perceive as a problem is simply the consequence of our ways of life. When the emergency becomes imminent, we try to resist in order to maintain our ways of inhabiting. In the face of this, each conflict can be seen as an opportunity to change our customs and develop critical reflection that allows us to look at reality in a slightly more interesting way.

The Venice Lagoon and the Mar Menor Lagoon are two remote ecosystems that share notable geographical similarities. Both have their geological origins in the formation of sand barriers that isolate them from the open sea, and both are highly anthropized ecosystems sensitive to changes caused by climate change.

On one hand, with an area of 136 square kilometers, the Mar Menor is the largest permanent saltwater lagoon in Europe. Located in the Region of Murcia, it represents one of the most important aquatic ecosystems on the continent. It is semicircular in shape and separated from the Mediterranean by a 22 kilometers long and 100 to 1200 meters wide sandbar known as La Manga. The ecosystem remained practically unchanged until the mid-20th century, except for small fishing settlements. The excessive development of La Manga since 1963 considered nature as an asset and focused on an economy based on tourism. Recognized in 1973 as a specially protected area by the United Nations, the lagoon is now on the verge of environmental collapse due to several causes. The main cause is the eutrophication of the waters caused by the discharge of urban and agricultural wastewater and waste through the dry riverbeds. Other contributing factors include the increase in aquaculture and urbanization, the impact of maritime lines in the area, the opening of channels for maritime traffic between the lagoon and the Mediterranean, rising temperatures, and sea level rise. Since September 2022, it is the only European ecosystem with a recognized legal personality, allowing every citizen to demand the reparation of damages caused to it.

Venice is simultaneously a floating city and a destination visited by sixteen million tourists each year. These two situations have become so normalized that any change is seen as a threat. Venice represents the dominance of the human over the non-human. One hundred and eighteen small islands exist beneath the buildings erected on wooden platforms driven into the sandy ground, forming a city that was meant to be a temporary settlement. Connected by canals and bridges for pedestrian travel, the flora and fauna of the Adriatic Sea dodge the thousands of boats, taxis, vaporettos, gondolas, and private vessels that pollute the waters. The city often floods three hours after the sirens sound due to the natural phenomenon of high tide. Human-generated climate change is causing these high waters to become more frequent and abundant, and some people seem to be concerned: some due to the effects on human interests, the impact on the tourism sector, and material and economic losses revealing an anthropocentric understanding of the lagoon based on a model of territorial exploitation. Others, including ourselves, acknowledge our ignorance and wish to do something, although we do not exactly know what or how, and we begin to ask ourselves:

Is it possible to address this seemingly catastrophic situation of both ecosystems from a more-than-human approach? Could the incorporation of time as an architectural variable open the door to other strategies? Can we incorporate expert voices from other disciplines to address this issue? How can we give voice to the non-human part to achieve a cohabitation pact?

The workshop S.L.O.W._Pacts for a more than human coexistence in the lagoons proposes a decelerating look and raises the need to represent all the heterogeneous but interdependent entities that have disparate interests in the lagoons, with the aim of building a framework conducive to the creation of structures and networks that mobilize agreements around alternative imaginaries of cohabitation. Through practices of estrangement, analysis, and critical registers of the built and natural environment, the learning community will elaborate cartographies and hypermedia models of approaching the city from the perspective of complexity, trying to design situations that will facilitate the development of cohabitation pacts between all species.

Figures of Catastrophe

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room A2

Water: an element so necessary to life and yet so dangerous for life itself…

In recent years, the problem of climate change has made us think frequently and urgently – and certainly not for the first time – about the devastating power represented by its lack or too much abundance in the many aspects in which it intersects our daily lives.

From the landscapes of a sunny and motionless Sicily in Piero Guccione’s paintings, to the horrid and romantic storms on the Channel, so often represented in William Turner’s canvases. From the anxious and incessant search for wells in the desert that permeates the entire narration of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, to the water that imprisons you on an island in the dystopian metaphors of a society in crisis of values recounted in Lord of the Flies or in Escape from Alcatraz. From the gardens with amazing fountains – a true attempt to represent Paradise on earth – in the Alhambra or Villa Lante, up to the catastrophe of the Vajont dam, up to the very recent one in Romagna. Water represents, like perhaps no other element on the planet, the ineluctability, danger and beauty of our fragile and overbearing passage on earth.

And the desperation of people fleeing famine, dictatorships and wars, who increasingly sail on waters very close to us, redeems horrible and dramatic crossings with desires that represent the need for hope in a better future.

The metaphorical value of the relationship with water and its light can and must become a tool for design reflection, beyond mere functional data.

The workshop will propose the design and construction of a collective installation which, through the collision between geometric and organic shapes, represents a design reasoning of the contrast between the solid and the mutable.

Transition(s), Transformation(s), Adaptation(s), Symbiosis(s) 

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room H

 

 

This atelier that we propose as part of Wave Iuav workshop is definitely an opportunity to take a step back to be able analyze in a prospective way the contemporary practices of the territory’s transformations. The subject proposed by turning around the impact of sea water rising on inhabiting territory, evokes a couple of questions: on the one hand, a reflection on the contemporary conditions of architectural practice, particularly linked to climate change. On the other hand, the subject permits us to rework in fundamental elements of the architectural discipline as : time, permanence, adaptation, uses.

When we analyze how the territory has been shaped by humans throughout history, we always find a sort of oppositional attitude between man and nature. The construction language bears witness to this. We say that we build defenses against floods, or against sea storms… but to defend ourselves against what? from whom? Wouldn’t it be more logical to design a territory in symbiosis with nature? A territory able to be adaptable and not immutable?

These questions lead us to the second issue that we would like to address in this workshop: the time in architecture.

The belief in an abundance of energy and resources from the industrial revolution led us to think and plan the cities as finished objects. The French “Villes Nouvelles” produced in the post-war period are a good example of this. In this model, the urban planner designs territory by creating a single and unique way of practicing the city, his project was not good and coherent until it was finished.

Today it seems impossible for us to continue working like this. The city and the territory must be reflected in different stages, creating fairly robust work scenarios that allow a coherent construction of the territory, but at the same time flexible enough to adapt to a changing world.

We want in our workshop to open these two fundamental questions among others. We have chosen a territory of experimentation, the Empordà in Catalonia and more particularly the Gulf of Roses.

Why?

First of all, because the geographical and topographic configuration is very similar to that of Venice. It is located between two outgoing lands, with beaches and marshy land in the center which will be very sensitive to rising water levels but also to the salinization of natural areas very rich in biodiversity.

Secondly, because it is a territory that was constituted in the 20th century from a policy linked to the production of an architecture linked to tourism, with very questionable real estate operations such as the creation of Ampuriabrava, but with a today’s will of the political power and of the population to move towards more sustainable tourism. This sector is today the one that contributes 60% of the region’s GDP and which would be strongly affected by a rise in sea water.

Ultimately, because it is a magnificent territory, full of vitality, good agricultural products, landscapes with an infinite view.

Concerning organization of the atelier, we will initially focus on the analysis and discovery of the territory allowing us to establish one or more strategies on a global scale. In a second step, we will work on 5 or 6 strategic sites of this territory in order to approach the problem on an architectural scale, thus allowing us to work on the forms, the constructions, the materials and the lifestyles of the inhabitants.

We will therefore use this site and this workshop as an opportunity to work together with you, future architects, on how we should react to this sea level rising: by opposing head-on? by adapting? by finding hybrid solutions? how should we act as architects in the challenge of continuing to inhabit an Earth that is not infinite in resources and energy?

At the edge of the sea

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room G

 

Si distinguono le città con il porto e le città-porto. Nelle prime i porti sono stati costruiti per necessità, nelle altre si sono creati secondo la natura dei luoghi; qui sono una mediazione o un completamento, là l’inizio o il centro; ci sono porti che restano per sempre soltanto degli approdi o ancoraggi, mentre altri diventano palcoscenici e infine mondi.

(Predrag Matvejevic, Mediterraneo. Un nuovo breviario, Garzanti, Milano 1993)

The theme of Wave 2023 can be interpreted as an opportunity to reflect on the particular urban condition of certain cities, such as those in Ukraine, which are devastated by war and subject to profound crises, both physical and related to identity. The great water basin of the Black Sea – the Pontos Axeinos, or the Pontus Euxinus in its most ancient Greek and Latin expressions – can be a particular way of interpreting this confrontation, between city and water, and can be the possible scenario where the theme of reconstruction and that of the defense of land and water can be linked together.

The history that binds the Black Sea to Europe is very ancient and complex, impossible to resolve in a specific and restricted project experience and in the brief time available, but which nonetheless allows us to focus attention on certain facts and on specific themes, drawing awareness of the complexity and relationships – between places, their history, and their territories – which cannot be forgotten. Once again, the opportunity of the project is to have a memory of the places and realities that have made life possible in these territories.

The awareness that the ‘terrestrial’ vicissitudes of anthropized territories are often taken into consideration is a necessary condition for overturning the point of view of urban history: starting from the sea, in some way circumscribed, such as the Black Sea, can be more than an alternative, a point of station, a way of looking at the environmental theme, also linked to an idea of sustainability, which assumes specifically the point of view of the sea – and its defense.

This assumption, which might seem a paradox – because the theme of the Wave focuses on the possibility of exporting Venice’s Mose system as a work of defense of the ’emerged lands’ from the ‘high waters’ – actually represents a point of view through which to interpret the relationship of architecture with the cities of water, and of all those ‘amphibious’ territories that relate with the sea. This point of view makes it possible to look at the sea not as an enemy of the city and its territory, but as an indispensable resource, in the same way that the Venetian lagoon is a necessary and indispensable resource for the survival of the city itself, as demonstrated by the dispute in the 16th century between Cristoforo Sabbadino and Alvise Cornaro. The Venetian example suggests that: architecture, nature, topography of places become not separate aspects of the project, but choral components of a broader cultural panorama concerning the experience of space and of its construction.

Fernand Braudel’s observation about the role of water in Venice as “divine and demonic water” also applies to us. As Braudel writes: “Water always water: it is the material, the material of the city. And first of all the water of the lagoon, which is the matrix of Venice”.

It was through the presence of the sea that the great urban civilisations were built, through trade relations, through the connections that the cities were able to establish by facing the water basins. The theme of the port-cities and wetlands takes on not only its economic, political and social role, but also on its figurative value, combining architecture, history and landscape.

In contemporary times, however, port-cities seem to be moving away from the sea, and many cities that are close to lagoons and basins, or on the Black Sea as in the project theme proposal, have lost this intense and privileged relationship, which made them recognisable and unique over the centuries.

The example of Odessa, with the great Potëmkin Stairs that extends into the sea and that represented one of the most ambitious architectures of this city, linking the upper city to the sea, has today lost any urban value and has remained an isolated fragment, a ‘character in search of an author’, as are other well-known architectures, such as the Maschio Angioino in Naples or the port of Venice from the 19th century onwards. The theme therefore translates into the need to reconnect places between the ancient city and its modernity, between the ancient city and its ‘amphibious’ history.

Mangrotopia (Ancestral Contemporary in Benin)

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room F

Perhaps to respond to some effects of the climate crisis such as the rising waters in particular contexts, we should imagine cyclopean mobile dams, as happened in Venice with the Mose… perhaps it could be answered in an alternative way.

To understand what are the alternative ways to build mitigation systems to protect coasts and settlements from the invasion and erosion of marine waters, we have chosen to work on one of the coastal areas of West African countries bordering the Gulf of Guinea, which represents one of these fragile, exotic contexts rich in different stories and legends; like that of the geographers who place the null point – null Island – geocartographic center of the Earth right in the Gulf of Guinea, where the Prime meridian crosses the Equator, or like that of the most ferocious slave trafficker, Francisco Félix de Sousa, fictionalized by Bruce Chatwhin in The Viceroy of Ouidah. However, Western-style legends and stories, while those of the place tell of sacred forests and fetish trees, for example, or of the Agodjié, the Amazons of Africa of the kingdom of Dahomey, who thrived in Abomey, and where today the forts of the colonial period and the ancient imperial palaces of Abomey and Porto Novo bear witness to a vanished kingdom and a past linked to the tragic Atlantic slave trade; or the stories of ordinary everyday life, which can still be experienced today, which tell of a conception of time totally different from the Western one, because it is not based on Newton’s conception of absolute time but on an idea of ​​time that is sometimes cyclical, linked to the repetition of marked activities from the events of nature, sometimes linear, based on longer events, on one’s history and genealogy, through the rites of the age groups.

Such a place is Benin, with its approximately one hundred and twenty kilometers of coastline made up of golden sandy beaches and palm groves into which two large lagoon ecosystems connect to the east and west connected to the Nokoué and Ahémé lakes. The lagoon, in Benin, with its extensive swampy forests, reed beds, floating vegetation and mangroves, the latter at risk of disappearing, represents the upper edge of the sandy coastal strip and the transition to the clayey agricultural plains; along this strip the lagoon intercepts the sea only in two points: to the west in the estuary area of ​​the Couffo river which flows from the plateaus of Benin into the coastal lagoons of Ahémé in the Atlantic, and to the east in Cotonou through the artificial channel dug in 1855. And it is the Route des Pêches, the fishermen’s road, winds along this coastal strip, connecting Cotonou, the only port city in Benin, to Ouidah, intercepting the Door of No Return, a monument erected on the beach at the end of the so-called Slave Road which it connects the city center to the ocean, and then continues westward, crossing lagoon areas, until it reaches the border with Togo. Precisely along this dirt road, which is already being transformed into an asphalted road, are the projects supported by the government of this country and put into practice by the large tourism development companies, such as Club Mediterraneé, to create a curtain of resorts and holiday villages on the beach and partly inserted in the lagoon strip, replacing the agglomerations of fishermen’s huts scattered in the palm groves along the beach. In the lagoon area fishing and agriculture are, on the other hand, until today, the main livelihood activities, together with the production of salt, as well as in Ganvié, the so-called Venice of Africa, a lakeside village on Lake Nokoué. The tourist economy, although a sure stimulus of economic wealth, risks altering the fragile social and cultural balances on which this Atlantic fringe rests its beauty.

Here, as elsewhere in Africa, except in the megacities often built around cities of colonial foundation, in fact, the architecture, stripped down to the bone, is most often created with extremely simple structures and compositions and is characterized by made of interweaving leaves, wooden planks or raw earth bricks and with straw or sheet metal roofs and roofs.

Getting the gaze used to the different forms of beauty of the landscape and architecture shaped by the tropical climate, where “ventilation is an absolutely primary value in homes as in public places and still air is worth nothing” (Kapuścinski, 2000), is the first objective of the workshop and for this reason the projects must ,first of all, describe this different living culture and then interpret it with a sort of contemporary ancestral inspiration, so that each of them, in strengthening the mangrove ecosystem – a necessary alternative for the protection of along the coast and at the same time a useful landscape architecture device for reducing, thanks to the aerial roots, the impact of floods and soil erosion – become an opportunity to recompose a sequence of spaces and places for a new mobility and for the recurring activities – agriculture, fishing, salt pans, tourism – with a view to sustainable and balanced of the economy/environment binomial in the areas that the teaching staff will indicate.

Light over Water

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room B

During this workshop, as architects and future architects we would like to look at the problem of the permanently or temporarily raising sea level as a design problem rather than a technical or functional one.

We will examine in how much and in which way changing water levels that interfere with and “intrude” into architectural space and form influence and change, through reflection, the perception of those spaces and forms, opening new ways in the creation of spatial and formal quality.

In doing so, we will create these differently perceived forms and spaces through application of a specific, well defined set of compositional rules. This specific composition method goes mainly back to architect Erich Mendelsohn. The learning and exercising of this particular compositional method is an essential part of the workshop program.  We will control, prove and represent the formal and spatial clarity and quality that reliably results from the application of this compositional method, by drawing perspectives of our creations in a certain way. We will not draw the architectural object itself, but just the light or the shadow reflected on its surfaces. This is about understanding that the representation of light and shadow alone can make, if done well and correctly, the architectural object clearly “readable” and satisfying for the eye, and already transmitting the effect of beauty that we all look for.

The first three days of the workshop will be spent with a series of inputs, smaller exercises and the logistical preparations for the following central work phases. Between the fourth and about the eighth day we will develop “architectural objects” in contact with water surfaces, according to the set of rules that has been mentioned above, in drawings and models made from “carta legno” cardboard. Of these “architectural objects” we will then make colored pencil drawings in a strictly defined manner, representing them by drawing nothing but light, shadow and reflection on water. The last three days will of course be spent preparing and setting up of the final presentation.

In terms of tools and material, we will use “carta legno” cardboard (1.0 mm and possibly 2.0 mm), as well as two particular pencils and drawing cardboard that will be specified at the beginning of the workshop. It is obvious that every participant should have all the usual tools for the construction of cardboard models and the preparation of precise pencil drawings.

We are planning to work mostly in groups of two. To enhance your learning effect, we encourage that groups be formed that include members from different “study age” and experience.  Groups of three or individual work will be accepted only in exceptional and well-motivated cases.

What do you bring on the Ark? 

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room C

It now seems certain that in order to cope with the scarcity of land and rising sea levels, humans will have to venture to live into the sea. It is not difficult to find examples of floating and non-floating city prototypes on the web and in magazines that simulate or anticipate this condition.

The idea of how humans can inhabit or anthropize the sea takes on different forms (albeit not very different) in these examples united by some constant characteristics: they are projects of modular and replicable cities that make values such as sustainability, coexistence in harmony with the marine environment, and resilience, the main points of their manifesto. Other elements, such as plant-based nutrition, electric and shared transportation, hydroponic agriculture, waste reduction, and the use of a material for platforms that promotes the growth of marine organisms, are corollaries to this virtuous self-narrative.

Unfortunately, these are “utopias” already packaged by large companies, where the tumultuous and in many ways mysterious life of cities, its architecture, its spaces, as well as the imagination of its future citizens, are normalized and directed down to the smallest details.

In the face of the homogenizing trivialization induced by this type of ecological-sociological-environmental pragmatism, the theme of the collective building on rafts (platform or floating structures) serves as a pretext to open a reflection on the “values” to be brought into play in order to restore cultural and human complexity to architecture.

Re[build and inhabit] the Pacific

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room D

 

 

Climate change, the melting of polar ice and the rise in sea level pose a significant challenge for cities situated on the coastlines of the entire world. In the cities located in front of the Pacific – and in Chile in particular – this problem is aggravated given its seismic conditions and the consequent generation of tsunamis, which are dynamic and unpredictable phenomena. In 1960, in southern Chile, the largest earthquake recorded in the world occurred (9.6 Mw), causing a tsunami that caused irreparable damage to infrastructure and human settlements.

These events occur periodically in a country with 4,500 kilometers of frontage to the Pacific: 2010 in Dichato (8.8 Mw, the fifth strongest earthquake recorded), 2014 in Iquique (8.2 Mw) and 2015 in Illapel (8.4 Mw). The situation is extreme if we consider the rapid and unregulated growth of urban areas in coastal areas, which increases the risk and vulnerability of Chilean cities. Although these phenomena are part of our history and culture, cities are not prepared to face them. The most recent and destructive events (Dichato, Concepción, 2010) caused devastating damage, but also left important lessons for integrating risk and mitigation of future catastrophic events of natural origin into architectural design.

Laguna Verde is a settlement located 15 km south of the city of Valparaíso, in central Chile. It has 3,500 inhabitants and in recent years the informal occupation of land for housing has increased exponentially. In this tomas (squatter settlement) the risk factors to which its inhabitants are exposed have not been considered, especially in the plain located between the beach and El Sauce estuary (41 hectares). This sector is at permanent risk of flooding, either by tsunami or by the overflow of the El Sauce estuary in the event of heavy rains.

This workshop will address this problem considering the negative impacts caused by these two risk factors, and at the same time, investigating their great potential for urban, tourist and environmental development, proposing new public spaces, equipment and/or housing adapted to the flood that improves its resilience.

 Following the lines of work and experiences developed by the School of Architecture and Design PUCV, the project method integrates the architectural observation, with local knowledge and vernacular construction traditions in maritime areas of the extreme south, where the architectural identity demonstrates the ability of its inhabitants to transform what is adverse into favourable.

2050 Venezia upside down

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room M2

Quanto fur grandi le tue Mura il sai,

Venetia, or come esse si attrovin vedi;

che se al bisogno tu non provvedi

deserta e senza mura resterai.

Li fiumi, il mare e gli uomini tu hai

Per inimici, li provi e non lo credi.

Non tardar, apri gli occhi e muovi i piedi,

che volendo poi, far non potrai.

(Cristoforo Sabbadino, proto of the Repubblica di Venezia, 1557)

Over the centuries, Venice has continued to remain the city “that has water for walls and the sky for roof” in an amphibious condition that belongs to the entire island and its formidable architecture, the fondaco palaces, the colonnades of the so called Galeazze, the great water basins of the Arsenale, the docks and salt warehouses at Punta della Dogana, the triangulation of St. Mark’s basin, but also squeri, boats bridges, rafts, gangways. Large and small architectures that mix and mingle with the water according to the changing tides, in a relationship that encompasses time and changes of state.

And if we place ourselves within a time that will come, say thirty years from now, and that places the consequences of climate change and the rise of the sea at the centre of its design in this unique lagoon city, the Mose bulkheads will no longer suffice to protect it.

And if we imagine that only a few rows of bulkheads will remain raised to reduce and mitigate the size and violence of the tides, the city will be able to continue living out its great destiny as a semi-immersed city-monument, but one that is alive and vital in its commercial offerings and cultural and tourist activities, to consolidate itself in the world’s collective imagination in all its uniqueness as a city where the still readable stone and water architecture will coexist with new floating or underwater architecture, placed along its perimeter on the north and south banks, allowing a different use of urban space.

And finally, in this new balance achieved between nature and artifice, it will be possible to preserve the lagoon’s precious biological and faunal system and the immense historical-architectural heritage of this island city, partly submerged but intact in its monumentality.

Venice, the Waterproof Superfortress. An exhibition at the Sant’Andrea Fortress on the architecture of the infrastructures of defence against water, from the Renaissance to the Mose and beyond

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room L2

Nature is often hidden; sometimes overcome; seldom extinguished.

(Francis Bacon)

The actions of enclosing, containing and protecting come together in the water defence architectures that have always characterised Venice, its lagoon and its cultural and geographical extension over the seas. From the huge Castello-Arsenale to the Batterie and Ottagoni that garrison the lagoon, to the fortifications lined up on the Adriatic and Ionian coasts, these architectures-infrastructures describe the great outline of Venice over the centuries as a “Superfortress impermeable” to invasions, as well as to the tides.

The historical Venetian Superfortresses express technical-infrastructural contents, but above all they represent demonstrative as well as utopian and fantastic models, belonging to the tradition of the ideal city and its representations. They are dreamed horizons and virtuous examples capable of presiding over the perennial re-balancing between human settlement and water.

The mighty masses of walls in the water of Butrint, Caffaro, Candia, Kefalonia, Corfu, Šibenik, Zadar, represented to scale in the bas-reliefs of the vestments of the Church of Santa Maria del Giglio and in the plan-reliefs conserved at the Naval Historical Museum of the Navy, reconstruct, all together, the metamorphic life of the “Superfortress-Venice”. They ideally decline the mythographic narrative of the city in the peremptory and permanent condition of a balanced relationship between the geographic extension of the waters and the artifice necessary for human life.

Venice – today subject to a permanent hydraulic emergency – provides an opportunity to rethink the role of the Mose, a new “Superfortress” on a geographic scale. Reflecting through an exhibition on the ways in which to harmoniously regulate the relationship between city, water and landscape, comparing history and the present, does not mean, however, turning nostalgically to the past, nor does it mean naively relying on the future, made unstable and nebulous by salvific technological promises. Rather, it means postulating that the world of historical architectural forms in relation to water is the bearer of settlement principles that can be reworked in the new forms of submerged infrastructures, of which the Mose represents the prototype.

The workshop will focus on the design of an exhibition to ideally place the historical Superfortresses in dialogue with the “Mose Superfortress” and its possible application in 52 other lagoons around the world. The exhibition designed on a scale of 1:50 and 1:20 will ideally be set up in the 16th century Fort of Sant’Andrea, which stands in front of the sea horizon as a symbolic and theatrical gesture. The Fort is today a sort of “intact ruin”, still bearing an exemplary clarity of design: a large solid disputed between land and water, interpenetrated by excavations, tunnels and rooms. The project will focus on the arrangement of drawings and scale models of yesterday’s and today’s Superfortresses within the Fortress’s voids, “air blocks” that insinuate themselves into the compact, incorruptible, impermeable matter of the building and excavate its volume, merging one into the other. The course will begin with a survey of the fortress.

An extreme defensive bastion, the Fortress of Sant’Andrea is the image that condenses the idea of Venice as an “Waterproof Superfortress”, a motionless ship that counteracts the tides, dialoguing with the mobile structures of the Mose aligned in front of it. The aim of the architecture of the “Superfortress exhibition” is to merge design and history into one another: the forms of Modernity – from the Renaissance to our present and beyond – will be realigned according to a different conception of temporality which, no longer considered a chronological fact, will express its plastic force in continuous, metamorphic and infinite becoming, restoring order, clarity and openness to the possibilities of our present.

Lacustrine dreams of a dry city: characters on Mexico City, Luis Barragán and water

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room L1

 

The history of Mexico City and its lakes is one of a complex, conflicting, tragic, and, in a certain sense, poetic relationship, whose characters, situations, and places emerge from the most diverse and unexpected conditions. This atelier proposes an approach to the tangle of events that led to a city now inundated due to water scarcity, reimagining its characters, situations, structures, and relationships based on the methodology John Hejduk used for his Victims of Berlin project.

Upon the arrival of Europeans, the great Tenochtitlán was a city surrounded by six lakes (each one of them a character in itself), which merged during the rainy season to form the vast Lake Texcoco (another character) that, at its peak, covered almost two thousand square kilometers. After five hundred years, a city of over twenty million inhabitants stands upon the traces of this grand lacustrine system. The lacustrine landscape is now a memory, as the city sinks and simultaneously faces water scarcity. We understand this great contradiction through narration, history, and its characters, who for centuries suffered the catastrophic consequences of floods, such as the one in 1629, the San Mateo deluge (also an important character in the story), when the city was submerged for five years after thirtysix hours of continuous rainfall. Many characters have appeared throughout this shattered relationship: the Chinampa, for example, a structure whose invention allowed the inhabitants of Tenochtitlán to develop a complex cultivation system along the lakes, or the Axolotl, a mystical amphibian, part deity, part inhabitant of the lakes, which currently resides among the few remaining Chinampas in the Xochimilco area and would not exist in any other environment in the world.

In this history, there have been characters of all kinds, like Luis Barragán, whose spaces such as the Patio de las Ollas, which temporarily floods, the Cuadra San Cristóbal, or the Fuente de los Amantes, represent a poetic approach to water, attempting to mend historical ruptures through personal and cultural memory. Tlaloc, the Mexican god of rain, is another character; the boats of Xochimilco; the channelized rivers of La Piedad, Consulado, Magdalena; the abandoned airport in Lake Texcoco, or the Vasconcelos Library, which is a grand ark of culture stranded in the garden within the vast dry ocean that is Mexico City, are other characters that help us understand the collective memory of Mexico City regarding water through architectural structures. Certain historical figures are key, for instance, the Grand Nochistongo Trench (a landscape and engineering character), which was the first attempt to drain the city towards Hidalgo, or the Ecatepec Embankment, a pre-Hispanic structure that protected the city from floods (with the Spanish invasion and the destruction of these structures, the city began to suffer more frequent inundations).

Drawing on the narrative and poetic approaches of John Hejduk’s architectural project for constructing memory, we will project the victims of historical, architectural, urban, and landscape characters who, together, construct a complex, tragic, and poetic narrative of the relationship between Mexico City and water.

Fluid crossing

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room J

 

When I ask if we are really a humanity, it is an opportunity to reflect on its real configuration […] If the contribution that those people from the caves made to the collective unconscious – this ocean that never runs out – connects with our terminals here, in that distant era. If, instead of looking at our ancestors as those who were already here a long time ago, we reverse the binoculars, we will be perceived by their eyes. […] a very interesting revelation: that the hunting scenes in cave paintings may not only be recording everyday activities, but talking about dreams […]. The type and dream I am referring to is an institution. An institution that admits dreamers. Where people learn different languages, appropriate resources to take care of themselves and their surroundings.

(A. Krenak, Life is not useful, pp. 33-34)

Water, that fluid matter that precipitates from the atmosphere, that evaporates through the melting ice and springs from the earth. Water, natural course that forms crossed and intertwined rivers until they meet the sea. Water, fluid matter that feeds and consolidates civilizations and peoples, which supported navigations from the overwhelming colonizing dehumanization of the planet, which can generate energy, which precedes who we will be, which is and always puts us in motion. Water, tangible and fluid crossing of who we are. The waters of those who were here before us. The waters of the Paranã river, in the language of the native peoples of Brazil, “the river the size of the sea”. Is it possible for us to understand these waters with the eyes of those who were here before us? Building dreams and reflecting on this territory Paranã Basin – Brazil is the purpose of this project workshop for Wave 2023.

The Paraná River Basin has a total area of ​​1.5 million square kilometers, where 800,000 are located in the Brazilian territory. In addition to Brazil, it is part of Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. The main river in the basin is the Paraná, which originates and separates the states of São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil. Until its incursion into Argentine territory, four hydroelectric plants – Jupiá, Ilha Solteira, Porto Primavera and Itaipu – barred its course. The installation of these plants, especially in Porto Primavera, has caused serious social and environmental disasters since the 1990s. According to data, the flooded area contained the largest reserve of clay in South America, affected at least fourteen species of endangered animals, flooded one hundred and eighteen archaeological sites and promoted the compulsory migration of one thousand seven hundred and twentynine riverside families. Among all the problems caused, compulsory migrations and the environment are the ones that remain. Even today, the cities of the Paraná basin in this region suffer from the flooding of the dammed lake and the opening of its floodgates. Islands were submerged in early 2023 and residents lost homes and businesses.

Faced with the data, the workshop aims to propose reflection on this territory in two ways:

First: Invert the binoculars

Diverge from the chosen territory. Here, I propose that people, based on the theme, learn different languages ​​and appropriate resources from the different experiences narrated in their territories.

Second: Build an institution that houses dreamers

Converge to the chosen territory. Here I propose that we build design reflections and, who knows utopian, for each river, animal and human being deprived of their habitat because of the flooding of dammed rivers. The case of the Porto Primavera Dam in the Paranã Basin – Brazil.

Aquatic Construction Sites 

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room A1

 

 

We are suspended in a world of fluxes and the ground is a turbulent medium.

(Tim Ingold, 2023)

The efforts of hydraulic engineers in interpreting flows behaviour are directed at establishing flow rates and levels, measures that fix fluids in static figures. Yet, also for hydraulics, measurements of rainfall, river flows, and sea levels are probabilities, not certainties. It happens that predictions are disproved, that levels are exceeded, that land extends into water and water extends into land. The figure of fluidity is the opposite of the ground as a stable support. What crumbles are the familiar foundations of architectural practice.

Aquatic Construction Sites recognises the pervasiveness of fluid conditions and the inexorable overcoming of flow rates and levels; in the Aquatic Construction Sites, fluidity is experienced. In order to enter a mindset of fluidity, we train body and language for three weeks, observing and touching fluid matter. We build that do not fight, capture and fix the fluid states, but allow and synchronise it. To do so, we proceed according to abductive movements, that is, observations, insights and experiments that, just as in hydraulic predictions, do not define absolute certainties rather probabilities.

The Aquatic Construction Sites are hosted by Venice’s existing situations that are strictly dependent on water, open to explore the lack of stability in its availability and collection of water, tidal fluctuations, contamination of the lagoon environment, and transitions in the state of the aquatic matter. The constructed devices will continue to inhabit the Aquatic Construction Sites after the three weeks of W.A.V.E. until they are able to synchronise with the fluid conditions.

Aquatic Construction Sites stems from the reflections developed within flux.urbains, a research network initiated by urbanes.land and Latitude Platform involving researchers, amateurs and riparian associations with the ambition of twinning Europe’s secondary rivers, hybrid bodies of water that are largely transformed and still essential for the future.

Water Walls Weave

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room N2

The protection of lagoons has evolved throughout history with various ingenious works: river deviation, embarking, wetlands, bottom modifications, productive and transitional land-water systems, waterfront articulation, fixed and mobile barriers, above and underwater.

The Venice Lagoon is an extraordinary model for its territorial and environmental specificity, historical cultural and landscape values, as well as for its fragility and the great wealth of heritage to be protected. A need for protection that in the last century directed the decision to defend it from high tide with a work of great complexity and unique of its kind. The Mose system with its seventyeight movable bulkheads, laid on the seabed of the three sea inlets, consists of hollow modules that are operated by expelling water and injecting compressed air, to emerge from the seabed when the high tide goes above the warning levels for the lagoon city.

For the Water Walls Weave workshop, the image of water walls building a weave, or rather a kind of armature of defense of the lagoon from rising seas constitutes the trigger for reflection on possible strategies for shaping coastal areas between sea and lagoon for flood risk reduction.

The built environment of lagoon and sea waterfronts tell in their structural differences the capability to react to and use water variation to conform the landscape, through different infrastructural and production processes, consolidating defenses against disruptive surges over time.

The focus of the WWW workshop is particularly on the possibilities of realizing a sustainable infrastructure of the coastal cordons bordering the lagoons from the sea. The reading will be developed through the study of natural and built defense systems accompanied by the modeling of sections that describe as much the stratification as the transformation and production processes of these middle lands between sea and lagoon.

The landscape of the coast ridge, with its internal and external waterfronts, will thus provide an opportunity to understand the decisive role of the adaptive conformation of open spaces and the areas of regulation and defense for production processes.

The workshop goal is to broaden knowledge and awareness of the  necessary transformation to preserve the characteristics of the lagoon landscape, experimenting on design strategies and adaptive forms in order to prefigure future scenarios.

The lagoon being investigated is the Mar Menor in Spain, located along the southwest Mediterranean coast. It is an enclosed sea that maintains a warm temperature throughout the year, where the Romans and Arabs built thermal baths around the coast, places still frequented today for the therapeutic properties of the baths. The Mar Menor has an area of 170 square kilometers, bounded by 73 kilometers of coastline and belongs to four municipalities, Los Alcázares, San Pedro del Pinatar, San Javier, and Cartagena. Its waters do not exceed a depth of 7 meters. There are salt marshes with important biodiversity reserves. What here divides the sea from the lagoon is La Manga, the coastal cordon that stretches from Cabo de Palos to Punta del Mojón, a strip of land 21 kilometers long and 100 meters wide on average.

Respect ageing?

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room M1

 

 

Ute Guzzoni in her discussion Building, residence, thinking reminds us that perhaps our attitude to dwelling is most intensely reflected through renovation. At the time when our planet has been transformed to such an extent that we are talking about the Anthropocene, it can be said that apart from rare exceptions essentially every one of our interventions in space is renovation.

Nature has an extraordinary capacity for self-healing and also to transform our living environment once we leave it. This is especially true of building heritage, which is completely degradable since it is made of natural materials. Today’s houses, surrounded by all possible layers of protection against external influences, no longer possess this ability, which best reflects the modern attitude to the natural environment.

As a rule, our dwelling takes place in built environments that are older than us, since they were created before our birth. Just as they shaped our ancestors, regardless of their quality, they also shape us. If they are to be used in a modern way, they must be adapted to new needs every time.

Of course, the question is how much we are willing to adapt ourselves. Because it is with our own adaptation that we can most fully experience what we wish to preserve, understand as cultural heritage, establish as our own, create a personal contact with the past and place ourselves in the arc of time of a certain space… so how does one capture and experience the imprint of time, of some other people who lived here, of some specific qualities provided by old construction techniques, materiality, and natural processes. Do we still know how to respect ageing (even in houses), how to experience patina; or do these experiences remind us too much of our own transience? Do we still know how to live with the seasons, observe, e.g., the morning light?

On the other hand, the question is how to actualise our built heritage, how to make it such that, despite its age, living in it can be fuller than living in new buildings. We believe that this is a matter of striking a balance, harmony if you like, between the found/detected/identified existing state and the new intervention in it, our presence.

So how to understand and upgrade the existing? What establishes quality? We understand renovation as a process of identifying the elements of the order of the constructed, the relation to the topography and other buildings, and the removal of those elements that disrupt this order.

Whenever renovation is needed, it is actually an expression of the need to restore balance in a space, which for a certain purpose at a certain time, had already been balanced.  For every contemporary situation that time and again brings changes, it is necessary to restore harmony between the new needs and the existing structure.

The central theme of the workshop are the ruins of the salt-producing landscape: stone walls of houses, fortified banks of navigable canals and vast salt marshes of former salt fields. The typical iconic image of the Sečoveljske Soline Landscape Park, the melancholic outlines of collapsed houses in the soft patches of vegetation between the mirror surfaces of the flooded landscape, was created by decay. A landscape between sea and land between sea and fresh water adapted for industrial needs. The characteristic morphological pattern, defined by use, without its purpose, at each high water, immediately began to transition into a new landscape value. When salt production was abandoned fifty years ago, there were more than a hundred houses in the area of the southern part of the Sečovlje salt pans. Today, only around seventy ruins remain, reminding of the once key economic activity of nearby Piran.

We will discuss the spatial phenomenon of one of the main navigation channels, Pichetto, in the central part of the Sečovlje salt pans. The task will face the challenges of transforming the built environment under the influence of nature into a new value. With the ability to leave historical architecture to decay, as an authentic process and the challenge of how to use such a space from time to time for the modern needs of observing and monitoring natural processes. And by questioning one of the key dilemmas: consistently letting the sea have its way or striving to maintain the delicate balance of a melancholic, industrial landscape transformed by natural processes, inhabited by rare birds and other creatures.

Ream

26.06 / 14.07.23 – room P

In this workshop, a selected group of students have the opportunity to contribute to the communication activities of Wave 2023. Supervised by bruno, a graphic design and editorial branding studio founded by Andrea Codolo and Giacomo Covacich, the students are involved in photographic documentation, video editing, creation of digital materials, and social media management, with the aim of narrating the workshop experience through the production of a series of advanced visual artifacts.

Lagunaria

26.06 / 14.07.23 – room N1

The goal of the workshops is to conceive, design, and create an exhibition centered around the docufilm “Lagunaria,” conceived and directed by Giovanni Pellegrini. Venice is at the center of the reflections in this workshop, and the narrative paths of the film provide great opportunities for a comprehensive and stimulating design process for a potentially highly interesting exhibition event.

The sections of the exhibition will be:

• CLIMATE CHANGE: In the last 100 years, the sea level has risen by 30 cm. In recent years, the increase has become more pronounced.
• POLLUTION: In the Venice lagoon, there is a floating plastic waste every 12 meters.
• ENVIRONMENT: The Venice lagoon is the ideal habitat for hundreds of fish and bird species. Pollution, human activities, and climate change are irreversibly compromising this territory.
• OVERTOURISM: In 2018, Venice was visited by over 12 million tourists. Today, the numbers have returned to pre-pandemic levels, and the trend is increasing.
• TRADITIONS: Venice is also a unique city for its craftsmanship. This sector has been affected by a hit-and-run tourism model.
• CITIZENSHIP: The city of Venice is losing about 1,000 residents per year. It is not a voluntary exodus; simply, the houses are all becoming bed and breakfasts.

Operationally, the workshop is organized into three weeks, each managed by a different teacher: the first week will be dedicated to the conceptualization and ideation of the exhibition, the second week to the development of the final and executive project of the event, and the third week to the communicative project and construction of the final exhibition.

During each workshop, the students will be supervised and guided by specifically assigned professionals:

• Week 1 (June 26-30): Giovanni Pellegrini (with Anna Valastro)
• Week 2 (July 3-7): Alessandro Pedron (with Marco Vittor)
• Week 3 (July 10-14): Lorenzo Mason (with Silvia Scocco)

General Coordination: APML | Pedron / La Tegola architects

Nugae

10.07 / 14.07.2023 – room K1

The laboratory focuses on field recording and ‘phonography,’ which are artistic practices that use audio recording technologies outside of the music recording studio. Through both practical and theoretical sessions, the aim is to promote simple, intuitive, situated listening forms that are complex, layered, and unique within contexts other than those aesthetically canonized by mainstream media and tourist narratives about Venice.

During the seminar, sound investigations in the field will be conducted under the guidance of Chiara Spadaro, an anthropologist and geographer with extensive knowledge of the ‘amphibious landscapes’ of the Lagoon and the city of Venice. She has been actively involved in research on the transformations of the lagoon landscape, the impact of human activities, and the consequences of industrial agriculture and its long supply chains.

The word “nugae” comes from Latin and refers to ‘trivialities,’ ‘trifles’: those details that usually escape attention. The term, borrowed from Zanzotto, is used by Spadaro in her research to suggest the need to focus specifically on that “‘swarm of micro-stories, of nugae’ that draws maps that have remained hidden so far, thanks to which we can orient ourselves and thus strengthen sensitive and active communities towards the place-Lagoon and the Lagoon-world.” (Spadaro, 2023)

In this sense, an inclusive approach to field recording is proposed, one that does not discriminate against the many possible sound configurations that occur in the encounter between specific bodies in specific spaces. Through personal experimentation with the provided audio devices, the technological recording instruments will be used not only as means to capture sounds or fix a stream but rather as tools to expand the possibilities of listening. The intention is to promote an ecological perspective of perception, understood as an inter-sensory, relational, and immersive process rather than a static, analytical, and separate contemplation of phenomena. Approaches to sound narration that dominate current entertainment and consumer products, which use sound as the main means of expression (podcasts and radio documentaries) and structure their form according to the principles of storytelling and logical consequentiality, will also be questioned. The workshop will explore possible approaches to sound work that are sensitive and organic, integrating non-human actors on one hand and exposing the material dimension and co-belongingness with the environment on the other.

No musical skills are required to participate.

No Islands but Other Connections

03 / 07.07.2023 – room K1

White Collage n° 1

26.06 / 30.06.2023 – magazzino 6, rooms 2.1 and 2.3

White Collage n° 1 brings together fashion design and upcycling practices, knitting, and the moulage technique. The workshop reflects on time and taking one’s own time, blending concepts and techniques, using textile scraps, yarns, and recycled fabrics, in line with the design approach of Serienumerica, a brand founded by fashion designers Maria De Ambrogio and Stella Tosco. Created in collaboration with Manteco, the workshop is part of the broader research project “Tempi responsabili – Responsible Times,” aimed at deepening the culture of sustainability and the relationships between the fashion industry and craftsmanship knowledge and skills.

Muro d’acqua. Immaginare la laguna al tempo del Mose

26.06 / 14.07.2023 – room J1