The Anatomy Lesson | E12, Special Mention
Europan 12 - Venice, Italy
The Anatomy Lesson is an effort to restart thinking the form of the city.
In the latest years contemporary architecture thought the city starting from its image.
Very often the solution to urban problems was put into the hands of the image, believing that make-up could hide wounds that instead need surgery. So we propose to build not the image, but the form of the city of Mestre.
We operate an anatomical dissection of the body of the city, a deconstruction to reveal hidden traces. The result is a map purified from the disconnected parts of the city that, due to their generic feature, have buried the urban form. It is a diachronic map showing only the fundamental elements: the organs of the city as new starting point to generate the form.
The map shows us a Mestre in-attesa
From here we start.
Whatever Happened to the form of the city?
The mainland of Venice has always been a “marginal” land, a wide-spreading area that has undergone deep and radical transformations over the past centuries.
These transformations, following a strategic development mainly oriented for the sake of its complementary part – Venice and the Lagoon – have generated a fragmented urban fabric marked by the lack of any individuality of urban artifacts. Then now Mestre is a simplistic and chaotic addition of urban parts near each other but totally divided and never able to become a whole.
In the past, Mestre was a city of castles, a trading city, a military city, an industrial city, a harbour city. It had various identities, always being a strategic place: the point of reference connecting Venice to the West; the crossroads between the western tracks and the cities of the North and, last but not least, the “bulwark” of the Lagoon. However it seems that these past identities didn’t leave any recognizable signs on the urban structure, except for a series of fragments now making Mestre only a wide-spreading periphery waiting for representing itself.
Can we then recognize a peculiar nature within the mainland of Venice? Can we represent its complex and various identities, finally releasing Mestre from the dependence of the Lagoon and, starting from the inside, looking for the reason and meaning of its peculiar nature, past and future?
We believe that for representing Mestre and revealing its own nature, we have to start from the form of the city. In the last years contemporary architecture thought the city starting from its image. Very often the solution to urban problems was put into the hands of the image, believing that make-up could hide and gloss over wounds that instead need surgery. So we propose to build the image, but the form of the city of Mestre.
We intend the form not like in Aesthetics, as something opposite to the content, but rather, like in Metaphysics, as something opposite to the matter, where the matter is what things are made of and the form is what produces the matter. From this point of view, the form is conceived as a structure, as a system of relationship that can generate an urban grammar.
In order to build the form of the mainland of Venice and to represent its own nature, we operate an “anatomical dissection” of the body of the city, a deconstruction of its parts to know and reveal hidden traces. The result of this dissection is a map “purified” from the real disconnected parts of the city that, due to their generic feature, have buried the urban form. It is diachronic map showing only a whole of fundamental elements (the “organs” of the city), as new starting point to generate the form. This map highlights the presence of the traces: some traces are only hidden, others are definitively lost but we preserve the memory, other ones are simply forgotten or ignored. This map shows us a Mestre in-attesa (in Italian in-attesa could have a double interpretation: unforseen/waiting).
From here we start.
The map of Mestre in-attesa is composed by fundamental elements that belongs to different historical periods and that all together could describe and resume its multiple and stratified identity. Analyzing each part of the map, we realize that each elements can belong to 3 + 1 categories, 3 +1 autonomous systems that are waiting for being connected with each other:
- the system of Castles: Castelvecchio and Castelnuovo. The first one, the castrum vetus from medieval age (and no longer existing), was the early fortified settlement of Mestre, built on the pre-existing site of an ancient roman castrum. The other one, Castelnuovo, was built on the opposite side of the river than castrum vetus and it is no longer existing too. However we know its original plan structure and one of the tower of its ancient fortification is still preserved.
- the system of Nature, including parks and woods surrounding Mestre and the streams that cross the city: the Marzenego river (and its branches) and the watercourse built to connect Mestre to Treviso whose filling earths generated the so called “Terraglio”;
- the system of Defence, represented by the military buildings scattered all around Mestre and belonging to the “Entrenched Field” . This Field, built up between the end of XIX and the beginning of XX century, is the last chapter in the history of the defensive system of the Venetian Lagoon.
In addition to this 3 systems, it is also to be considered the net of infrastructures that sign and cross the mainland. It is composed by the railway, the main arterial roads and the waterways and has always contributed to make Mestre a strategic place of interconnections between the Lagoon and the western cities.
Our project proposal means to add to this map of Mestre in-attesa 3 new elements that establish a double relationship with the 3 systems so previously identified. On the one hand, the new elements originated their nature from the 3 main systems; on the other hand, they give systems a new meaning, allowing them to create interconnected relations. This way, the 3 systems of reference turn themselves from an “inert matter” into a “generative matrix”of urban form: the Castra, the Woods and the Entrenched Field. They become formal categories which refer to 3 fundamental human actions (to plant: the wood; to fence: the castrum; to excavate: the trench) and their compositional principles generate the project. Then the 3 projects for Mestre assume their own identity from the correspondances between with the following themes: the housing/precinct, the garden/ wood, the railway station / trench.
The new Mestre illustrated by this map reveals us its real nature and , in a paradoxical way, its basic structure doesn’t seem so different from the structure governing its counterpart (the Lagoon): Mestre appears us as an “archipelago” of faraway and separated islands that, floating in a common and homogeneous sea, are however strictly interconnected each other thanks to their “individuality”.
Each part of the project (A, B, C) has in itself the seeds of its own generative matrix and all the parts together create a whole, even though separated, able to give a new meaning to other islands through a series of correspondances, representing the first step towards the definition of urban form.
A: The Precinct
The Precinct is the generative matrix for housing project. It is composed by 2 squared courtyards - one of 120X120 m and the other of 78X78 m - placed within a dense wood. The inside of the courtyards, on the contrary, is lacking of trees and characterized by a wide green lawn, conceived as a “collective space “. The residential blocks are located all around this lawn defining the border and the separation between the inside/lawn and the outside/wood. The oppositional relationship between the inside, totally open, and the outside, full of vegetation , shows the double nature of the act of fencing. On the one hand it refers to the idea of a walled castrum, on the other hand it refers to the idea of a clearing, a free space within the green mass.
This way the squared courtyards are intended as precincts/clearings that, separating the outside-public-wood (the natural prosecution of the Park of Piraghetto) from the inside-collective-lawn overturn the canonical binomial inside/outside. As a consequence houses have the preferred view on the collective space, a choice underlined by the presence of continuous balconies along the 4 facades open towards inner courtyards.
B: The Primigenial Wood
The Wood is the generative matrix of the garden project. The garden is composed by a dense green mass enclosed by a 5 meters height wall where, along Via Piave, there are only the main entrance and one squared window, allowing the reverse view of the wood, from the outside to the inside. This area is not conceived only as an urban garden but also as fragment of the primigenial wood, remainder of aVenetian ancestral landscape, preceding the foundation of the city and, perharps, preceding human presence. This way the wood is intended as the mythical representation of the archetype of labyrinth. The wood is enclosed to underline that is an element other than the city, clearly identified.
C: The Trench
The third and last element of this “mainland tryptique” is the railway station area of Mestre where the generative matrix is the Trench.
The Station is conceived as a long urban collective place organized and articulated on different levels. It hosts not only the functional spaces and facilities requested for the station, but also cultural and leisure areas, becoming a new urban catalyst and the “first experience” for the tourist arriving here by the train to visit then Venice and the Lagoon. The Station area is a linear sequence of spaces of different forms and functions located between 2 long arcades (5 meters height) that creates a filter between all these spaces and Viale della Stazione, on one side, and the railway tracks and platforms, on the other.
