THE EASTERN LAGOON FRONT
Programme for the Design Work at the 25th ILAUD Laboratory
(Venice July 24 – August 25, 2000)




One of the main problems Venice is presently facing is the one known as of ‘high water’. It is a problem that is becoming more and more urgent partly because the town and many of the islands are frequently invaded by water and the ground floors of the buildings and the open spaces are flooded, but also because the tide system has been altered. Also altered is the rhythmic exchange of water between lagoon and sea, that used to ensure the cleaning, and therefore to preserve the life of both nature and human beings.
We know that the cause of the unbalance in the lagoon lies in the massive and rash interventions (deep channels for the tankers, oil pipelines, industrial refuses, etc.) that have been carried on without looking at the whole natural and artificial context, but concentrating only on single parts. No consideration was given to the fact that the equilibrium in the Lagoon has always been unstable: natural events and human action continuously dissolved it, and the inhabitants unceasingly recomposed it, with multiple, even minute actions, where alteration and disconnection occurred.
It is certainly difficult to return to this kind of awareness and of creative control of the territory, and it would in any case require deep cultural, social and individual changes that certainly cannot occur in a short period of time. Nor one can imagine that there are authorities capable of repairing the damages produced by wrong interventions through the undoing of their causes.
It is therefore necessary to proceed by compensations: with new interventions that can neutralise the most harmful ones and, in the case of high water, by foreseeing works of defence that can re-establish a regular hydraulic exchange (one that doesn’t produce flooding and guarantees the cleaning of the canals and the survival of the ecosystem) between Lagoon and Sea.
This is the line followed by the Town Council of Venice in the recent years that at a certain point came to the MOSE proposal. At first it was considered convincing, therefore feasible; then it was deferred, as its implementation was difficult, its results disputable, its maintenance troublesome and highly expensive.
A model was built of one of the elements of the MOSE, and other experiments will be carried out before a final decision is taken. It will be necessary to check if all its elements, joined together to bar the three harbour mouths (Bocca di Lido, Bocca di Malamocco, Bocca di Chioggia), will prevent the sea water from flooding the lagoon when the wind blows, allow the lagoon water to flow into the sea at low tide and the sea water to enter the lagoon at high tide. It will also be necessary to check that the various elements of the MOSE will keep on rotating at the right time and in synchronism with one another, notwithstanding incrustations and rust that will hinder their movement. Because the MOSE is an underwater dam that should hardly appear above the surface, as was required of any research carried out on the problem of high water control in the Venetian lagoon.
Why this requirement?
Because the Venetian lagoon is considered a work of art, perfect and finite, and the authorities in charge of the protection of the Italian arts heritage (with the support of a rather diffused public dopinion) have decided that any contemporary visible artefact would irreparably compromise its harmony.
ILAUD’s work in Venice during the next two years, 2000 and 2001, will take off first of all by questioning this axiom that appears as a backward prejudice.

Why is the idea that nothing new should be built in the lagoon a prejudice? There are at least three reasons.

A. The natural configuration of the lagoon is the result of the continuous doing and undoing, adding and subtracting, adapting and changing, that in two thousand years have imbued the imagination and competence of its inhabitants. The landscape that has emerged from this engagement is of unequalled refinement. But what is even more rare and precious is its experimental energy, its capacity of matching artificial and natural, its ‘organic functionality’ (rational organicity). When individuals and social groups of all ages have acted accepting the rules of this miraculous process, they have produced consistent and highly meaningful changes: up to two centuries ago, when the French and Austrian domination inserted new artefacts - urban events and new naturalistic places - consistent with one another and with the ones from the past, that we nowadays consider ‘Venetian’ just as the preceding Byzantine, Baroque or Renaissance ones.

B. The Darsena Nuovissima at the Arsenal, the more recent interventions at the new harbour at S.Marta, the Via Garibaldi context and the Napoleonic Gardens, and above all the many public buildings constructed by the Austrian administration, show that there is no predominant language from a particularly glorious period to which successive languages have conformed. The Venetian architectural language is in fact ‘multiple’, open to morphologic invention and reluctant towards typological and normative constraints. Every historical period was able to assume that same positive attitude and nothing prevents that also our time do the same.

C. What is decisive in the judgement of an artefact - especially if it belongs to a technical or utilitarian context – is not its date of construction, but its intrinsic quality: that is connected to the correspondence to its use, its consistency with the physical context it belongs to, its power of expression.


There are contemporary utilitarian artefacts of great beauty – in the Netherlands the closing of the Zuiderzee was designed by W. Dudok and recently in Denmark recent artefacts of great quality have enriched the seascape.
There is no reason why the same should not happen in the Venetian lagoon.

This year ILAUD will start to approach with tentative designs the problem of how to create ‘artefacts’ that are visible’ at the Lido’s sea Mouth, whose aim is to regulate the exchange of water between sea and lagoon.
Difficult to say now what kind of artefacts will be proposed for the tentative designs (dam, barrage, locks, etc.), but at the end of July, when the international groups will start designing, we will have clearer ideas, as we will have read the literature on the subject, examined the various proposals put forward in the last thirty years, gathered information on other cases where similar problems were approached and solved, discussed with the Research centres and the Venetian institutions their expectations, programmes and proposals. By then we will have developed ideas and established strategies that will allow us to relate the configuration of the new artefacts that will be visible at the Lido Harbour Mouth, with the whole front facing the lagoon, that includes the islands of S. Elena and S. Pietro in Castello, the eastern edge of the Arsenal, the island of Certosa: the new ‘face’ of Venice that will appear to the travellers arriving by sea through that Mouth.

The tentative design will approach also this subject: the eastern edge of the lagoon.
The design of new artefacts at the Lido Mouth and the lagoon front from S. Elena to Certosa will be approached at the same time, as if they were two different aspects of the same theme.
When facing them the international groups will refer to the knowledge acquired by the Laboratory in the last three years: on S. Elena, the Biennale Gardens, the urban strip of the district of Castello articulated on the Via Garibaldi, the whole system of the Arsenal, the portion of Fondamenta Nuove (and Nuovissime, already proposed by ILAUD) with the possible landings for the ferry boats from Tessera, the dry-docks peninsula. The readings and designs developed for these areas will be the backgrounds (a set of experimented and stimulating references) for the readings and tentative designs that ILAUD will carry on in the next two years.
The first year will focus on the ‘exploration’, the second one will aim at producing propositions and images of the ‘effects’ that could be induced on the lagoon and the eastern urban system, by starting a process of modernisation that does not destroy, but on the contrary improve and refine, the marvellous characters of the place: in every sense starting a process of sustainable development.
We can’t hide that the future towards which ILAUD is moving is rather difficult. But the ground is the same on which Research centres and Institutions have moved along before us, and in the past years proposed solutions that have proved to be impracticable and not persuasive. ILAUD will have the advantage of knowing the proposals that were not persuasive and therefore failed; of having the possibility of referring to the body of readings and tentative designs that the international groups produced in the last three years, reaching a deep and unconventional knowledge of the urban and eastern lagoon’s context; of being able to refer any proposal to the ‘environment’, that is to an inclusive universe allowing for an holistic vision of the problems approached.
As for the systems for the control of the waters, ILAUD will have the advantage of moving in the domain of the ‘visible’, free from the unfounded (and somehow immoral), prejudice that change is deterioration and therefore better that it not be seen.




The theme is vast, and so is the territory. How can it be sub-divided?

The theme is vast, and even vaster is the territory it describes. It is therefore necessary to reduce it, so that at the next Laboratory the design groups do not risk not to lose its control. Looking at the dimension, they might in fact decide either to approach the whole of it in generic terms, or else to deal with parts unrelated to the context and therefore insignificant for our scope. It could be useful to therefore ‘sub-divide’ the theme – as well as the territory – upon the description given in the first programme discussed in Venice on May 19 and 20. In that programme different, though interrelated subjects were described: the Lido Harbour Mouth, the Eastern Front of the Lagoon, the Arsenal’ls eastern side, the Fondamenta Nuove (and in ILAUD’s proposals of the last two years, also Nuovissime).
Let us start from the first two to detect some of their most evident problems; then we will make some observations on the latter.


The Lido Harbour Mouth and the defence against high water

It is not our task to design the barrage at Lido harbour Mouth that should regulate the water’s flux and reflux between sea and lagoon, in order to prevent the disastrous phenomenon of ‘high water’. This is a technical problem for which we have no competence. We are interested instead in two aspects of the barrage that are important for the consequences on the environment and the landscape, in terms of architecture and urban design:
- How will the barrage be, once we accept that it be ‘visible’, if it becomes a significant spatial event (at the same time more reliable and less expensive)?
- What consequences will the presence of the barrage produce – or induce - on the territory around the Harbour Mouth?

To answer the first question one needs to study the various proposals made in the last thirty years. An Italian group is already gathering the documents, will examine it and will prepare a synthesis to be presented at the end of July. The same group will also carry out a quick search to understand how the same problem – tide control - has been dealt with in other Countries, where similar problems occurred.Moreover, they will gather any useful information on the subject from the ILAUD Schools. Once we have the results of this query, we will have the ‘quantitative’ measure of the problem and we might be able to make some choices, maybe superficial, but nevertheless enough for the production of ‘simulations’ the groups could assume as starting points.

In order to answer to the second question, one needs to start from the assumption that the system of tide control goes well beyond the merely technical answer. A barrage will produce a morphological change of great impact on the configuration of the north-eastern lagoon, especially if it will be entirely and deliberately ‘visible’. Furthermore, it will generate opportunities for the introduction of other complementary activities supporting it and turning the whole intervention into a significant, reasonable, economical enterprise. Assuming that the barrage is a dam (or something similar, that opens and closes when necessary), then the two sides of the Harbour Mouth would be linked (even if only at given times) and the link could become a road; therefore the whole strip from Malamocco to Punta Sabbioni and the Mainland would be connected by car traffic. This would mean a big change; it would no longer be necessary to pass through Venice to bring cars to the Lido, the ferry between Punta Sabbioni and Venice would become more important than it has been thought of up to now, etc.
One needs to take into account also that the construction and the functioning of the barrage will bring life and movement in a territory now deserted and still, and will bring new activities. Among them, one could imagine boat shelters, cafes, leisure facilities, lookouts to watch the sea and the lagoon, the ships going by, the ingeniousness and hopefully the elegance of the new artefacts built on land reclaimed from the water.
Once an hypothesis is agreed upon (one that seems reasonable because already tested successfully elsewhere in similar circumstances, and that nevertheless needs to be checked technically, and will by the experts called by ILAUD to collaborate) that can be simulated, it will be possible to design ‘tentatively’ the spatial consequences of the temporary connection between the two sides of the Mouth, as well as the insertion of complementary activities on both of them.


The Eastern Front of the Lagoon

This is the name given to the sequence of banks facing east of the islands of S. Erasmo and Certosa, the dry-dock peninsula, the Arsenale (Isola delle Vergini), the islands of S. Pietro and S. Elena.
It is the first view one has when coming by sea through the Lido Harbour Mouth, of Venice and the Lagoon. It’s like an apparition at the end of the travel, the ‘face’ of Venice announced from the Lagoon. If it were to change, it could become the ‘new face’ of Venice and maybe – if tourism by sea will increase as is expected by many – the most memorable, as it was in the past. In any case, to have a precise idea of this ‘new face’, it is necessary to design it ‘tentatively’.
S. Erasmo is an almost deserted agricultural island. Should it keep its character and be protected from new construction, or could it accept transformation? It seems reasonable to choose the idea that it should keep its present role in the lagoon economy and landscape.

The island of Certosa also is agricultural, although it contains a relatively recent and very visible residential settlement for the Army officers. This presence appears as a tear that should probably be mended, thinking not only about its intrinsic equilibrium, but also the regaining of a harmonic relationship with the landscape.

A lot has been said about the dry-docks Peninsula in the last two years, when the Laboratory focused on the urban and lagoon context of the Arsenal. Several projects came up with interesting propositions that could usefully be looked over from the Laboratory’s new point of view. Probably those propositions need to be re-adjusted, maybe even discarded or substituted. This is the aim of the ‘tentative projects’: not to seek univocal and finite solutions, but to open a process that enfolds the problem, observes it from different angles, de-structures it to then re-structure it until it reaches a state of equilibrium (that in any case is provisional). This seems the only way of filtering in contemporary reality that changes at a frantic speed; and the faster the speed, the more the tendency is towards homogeneity. Only a design that at the change of the circumstances, manages every time to reach new states of equilibrium (functional, formal, expressive) is possible, provided it is conscious that further changes in the circumstances will de-stabilise the former equilibrium, and therefore yet another one needs to be found.

The same could be said of the Arsenal’s eastern edge of the, especially the Isola delle Vergini that partakes of the ‘new face’ of the Eastern Front of the Lagoon. It is a fascinating and mysterious garden to be preserved and protected.
Connections need to be solved, on one side with Sansovino’s Gaggiandre and on the other with the island of S. Pietro. It could be worthwhile re-examining the Laboratory’s proposals drawn in the last two years.

Proposals were also drawn for the island of S. Pietro, an important ‘hinge’ in the Eastern Front of the Lagoon, in morphological terms (it is at the centre of the system and has a particularly significant configuration) as well as historic and cultural (it was the seat of the first Venetian cathedral). In ILAUD’s proposals, this role as a hinge of a system was not considered enough, and therefore could be reconsidered more carefully.

The island of S. Elena was studied thoroughly during the first Venice Laboratory in 1997. The proposals did not produce significant reactions within the Town Council; nevertheless many still seem valid, and could be ‘critically’ transferred as hypotheses for this year’s work.


The Arsenal and the Fondamenta Nuove

The last two subjects of the Programme are the Arsenal and the Fondamenta Nuove (and Nuovissime). They are two background subjects, not to be tackled directly by the Laboratory, but kept as reference for the first two, as they are among the main connection points for the town.

During two years ILAUD ‘read’ and ‘designed tentatively’ the Arsenal. As it was quite clear that the Town Administration preferred that the research work did not enter the body of the Arsenal, the Laboratory focused on its surroundings. This approach proved to be very fruitful, as it gave the opportunity of exploring thoroughly this problem (fundamental for the future of Venice) of urban renewal as a premise – and a consequence - for the modernisation of the town.
Assuming that the Arsenal’s artefacts are recovered and properly used, how should the surrounding urban context be restructured in order to absorb and (stimulate) positively this transformation?
ILAUD gave an answer to this question through many projects that invest the whole perimeter of the Arsenal, from viale Garibaldi, to San Francesco della Vigna, the Arsenal’s north-eastern edge, S. Pietro, S. Elena, the Giardini della Biennale.
This year’s laboratory can refer to those projects, as several of them are still valid.
Whatever the destiny of the Arsenal (a centre of new energies directed to the whole world or – as seems more likely – the division of the magnificent artefacts to answer to modest local interests), ILAUD’s projects contain many proposals, whose motivations and consequences have been carefully studied, that could be rather useful for the town Administration.
As for the Fondamenta Nuove, ILAUD studied them in different occasions, mainly in relation to the insertion of the terminal for the ferries between Venice and Tessera. Once again, several proposals were well founded and could be assumed by this year’s Laboratory. Particularly interesting is the hypothesis of extending the Fondamenta Nuove – as Fondamenta Nuovissime – to the dry-dock peninsula.




Two sub-themes and seven sub-sub-themes

As a conclusion to what has been said up to here, the wider theme suggested by the Programme can be divided in two sub-themes:
D. the re-organisation of the area around the Lido Harbour Mouth
E. the design of the Eastern Front of the Lagoon from S. Erasmo to S. Elena.



Sub-theme 1 can in turn be divided in:
1.1 how the Harbour Mouth and its system of connections with the Lido, Punta Sabbioni and the mainland could change if the barrage were to connect the two banks;
1.2 how the territory around the Lido Harbour Mouth could change if, as a consequence of the construction of the barrage, complementary activists were introduced.

Sub-theme 2 can instead be divided in segments that include one or more islands belonging to the Eastern Front of the Lagoon:
F. eastern edge of Certosa
G. north-eastern edge of the dry-dock peninsula
H. north-eastern tip of the Arsenal’s wall
I. north-eastern edge of S. Pietro
J. eastern edge of S. Elena.

One can imagine that each design team at the Laboratory will choose one or more among these sub-sub-themes. Three conditions are nevertheless to be kept in mind:
- the largest number of sub-sub-themes should be covered, in order to have at the end an overall picture
- each group should be constantly aware of the others’ work, in order not to lose consciousness of the research in general
- after the end of the Laboratory a group (probably Italian, but maybe partially international) should construct a mosaic of the work done and prepare the framework for 2001’s Laboratory.



Notes on how to design around a new Harbour Mouth at the Lido of Venice


The point is not to take the engineers’ place in the design of a system of barrages that can re-establish a balanced exchange between Sea and Lagoon. Neither is it to paint watercolours to show the new configuration that the northern Lagoon could have once the Lido Harbour Mouth will incorporate the system of barrages designed by the engineers. The point is simply to do what architects always should when they are facing a problem of this nature, dimension, and refinement:
- understand the meaning of the changes that are occurring under the thrust of new circumstances
- foresee the images those changes could produce in the physical space
- read the organisational and formal tensions that in those images reveal unbalance
- de-structure and restructure those images to rebalance them through the design of new organisational and formal figures of their parts and of their whole, consistent with the changes that have occurred.

The work of the engineer is analytical, that of the painter allusive. The contribution of the architect should instead be direct and synthetic, in other terms evocative (it should rouse ideas) and at the same time concrete (translatable in real actions): it should reach the point with precision and therefore gather along the way all the possible knowledge.
Vitruvius in his Treatise on Architecture records about 1200 words to list everything an architect should know; but ends with one only line to say that to have cognition of a craft doesn’t mean that one knows how to use it.
In our case, as well as of how to use our craft with competence and of the precious uniqueness of Venice and the Lagoon, we should have as deep knowledge as possible of:
- the stability/instability of the lagoon system
- the sequence of actions and reactions that have guaranteed over time the equilibrium of the whole system
- the motivations and consequences of the present unbalance
- the actions and reactions that could re-establish the equilibrium and the reasons why they are not pursued
- the operations – small and big, immediate and long-range – that have in time been made to adapt the organisational system and the form of the Town and the Lagoon to new circumstances (natural order, human behaviour, economic structure, power distribution, technology)
- the aims and dynamics of some big operations that have provoked important and ‘visible’ changes in the configuration of Town and Lagoon (the Harbour Moths, the Murazzi, the port installations, the stadium at S. Elena, the bridge connecting to the mainland, etc)
- the proposals made in recent years to solve the problem of high water
- the proposals made in other Countries to solve similar problems
- the work done by ILAUD in Venice in the last three years (the eastern edge of the Lagoon: S. Elena, S. Pietro, eastern side of the Arsenal, dry-docks, ferry terminal at Fondamenta Nuove)
- the main points of the discussion on the need for utilitarian events in the Lagoon not to be ‘visible’: otherwise they would alter the historical scene that is by now considered perfect and finite.

The Laboratory, referring to the knowledge of these subjects, and others that will come out of the readings, will investigate the area between the Lido Harbour Mouth and the eastern edge of the Lagoon, through a series of tentative projects.
The area is rather wide, but it is not necessary to cover it all. The aim of the tentative projects is to set in motion a process of unveiling of the spatial disequilibrium and to define concepts, methods, tools, languages, etc. allowing to re-establish equilibrium. The tentative projects should explore what is needed for this end.
Murazzi

Murazzi are a system of defence against the violence of the water in the Sea and the Lagoon. They are ‘visible’ and also rather beautiful to ‘see’.
They have become significant places where people go to walk, swim, look at the sea.

Gather information on their construction – when, why, how? Decided by whom? Designed by whom? Upon what criteria?
Photographic documentation (slides) to show the asset of their ‘visibility’.


Bocche di Porto

Bocche di Porto (Harbour Mouths): at Lido, Malamocco, Chioggia. They are important and visible works. Their technical scope could have been crossed with other emblematic ones, adding uses and meanings (tourism, boat shelters, small recreational facilities, outlooks like Dudok’s Zuiderzee).

Gather information and documentation; when, why, how where they built. Decided by whom? Were they discussed? Were there alternatives? Who designed them? Upon what criteria?
Photographic documentation (slides). To show that their ‘visibility’ is positive.


The quality of being ‘visible’ in the Lagoon

Reflect on how ‘visible’ anything is in the Lagoon. There are undoubtedly many secrets on the quality anything in the Lagoon must have in order to be visible, and unacceptable that they be ‘invisible’.
For instance: how ‘natural’ should an artefact be to establish a harmonic relationship with the surrounding environment; so that to ‘see it’ is a reassuring experience (beyond the curiosity it arouses) and pacifies (because it makes the inevitable contrast with its surroundings acceptable, agreeable)?

What if the Murazzi were not made of Istria stone? The texture, the colour, the reflection of the light would be different; they would be in contrast with textures, colours and reflections of the environment; they would not be as ‘natural’.

This is not to give indications on how to solve the problem, though it says something on how it should be approached.
Look at the signs in the Lagoon with this perspective. Why is it that they are just right, to the point that nothing different can be imagined? How is it that they have reached such deep levels of refinement, in their conception, design, economy of means? What kind of culture (relationship to nature, capacity of interpretation, sharing of experience, mutual support, etc) has allowed to reach them?
This we ought to keep in mind: that we need to know a lot more.








Giancarlo DeCarlo
May-June 2000