Souvenir from la Giudecca
Location:
Unfolding Pavilion 2018 (16th Venice Architecture Biennale)
Gino Valle Social Housing Complex at La Giudecca (Calle dei Lavraneri ,30133 Venezia)
In 1971, Haus-Rucker-Co, an Austrian radical architectural collective, designed Palm Tree Island, a sort of oasis world where nature was preserved from the urban infrastructural context. This suggestion, reminding an idyllic space protected from the urban environment, kept form in space spectacular sphere. The operation of including the urban landscape in a cliché is evidentially inverse for these case: in Haus-Rucker-Co case, it was aiming to conserve nature against urban growth, while in our proposal, the whole scenery will be forced and closed in a sort of cliché box. In fact, nowadays we are witnessing a devaluation of the urban landscape, in particular, the Italian one: it is mostly underrated, hardly depicted and mainly forced in a different kind of a stereotype, as souvenirs do.
Intentionally provocative, “Souvenir from La Giudecca” wants to underline the strict line between the consecration and the preservation of this architecture: from one point of view, the proposal rising up the Gino Valle’s social housing complex as a monumentum to discover and appreciate in our architectural heritage world, from the other one, it wants protecting and preserving his status inside the historic urban fabric of La Giudecca.
Dimensions and materials:
1.Souvenir. 16 (cm) Ø sphere.
Paper, plexiglass, glue, plastic, sandstone, wood, steel.
2.Handmade collage. 30x40 (cm).
Mixed media.
