Innesti Contemporanei a Venezia - A proposal for Palazzo Ca' Tron
SECOND PRIZE WINNER PROJECT
The Waterproof international design competition forces to reflect on the controversial theme about restoration in Venice. A city that has always been suspended between the need for conservation of its monumental heritage and the aspiration to welcome new traces of contemporaneity.
The Context
The Ca’ Tron Building, an historical Palazzo overlooking the Canal Grande, represents the synthesis of shapes and additions that over time have modified and innovated the original appearance of the building. At the small scale this building is an example of the tendency for Venice to be a laboratory of renewal experiences of past architectures.
Despite Venice is home for conservative extremism, it is its own artistic-cultural history that tell us a different story.
It is a center, with an extraordinary historical value, that presents a complementarity of styles and languages in a limited physical distance. This determines the power of its own image.
Venice is able to renew itself and accept testimonies of different times without diminishing its value.
The project for the Ca’ Tron Building represents an opportunity to develop strategies able to weave new relationships between building and context, explaining the potential of the reuse of historical heritage to build “better architectures” able to respond to the needs of the present
without betray the authenticity of places.
The project
Over the years it has become a marginal academic territory and has several times slip out of the big groups of the world hôtellerie.
Ca’ Tron offers today, with the international Waterproof competition, to trace the path that the many buildings, still publicly owned, present in Venice, could emulate.
The project tries to imagine a programmatic future, even before a spatial one.
Redesigning the new entrance becomes an opportunity to improve the usability of the building, imagining it not only as a university but as an extension of the public space within the city.
The wings of the building, at all levels, are equipped to accommodate spaces strictly related to educational use and services connected to it.
The halls and the garden, historically used as entertainment spaces, lend themselves to hosting activities, such as exhibitions, conferences and small performances, not directly related to academic activities, but included in the wider circuit of the city’s cultural offer.
At the last level, a small guesthouse is set up to accommodate researchers and students who take advantage of the wide university educational exchange offer.
A model that makes it possible to increase the usability of the building
during the day and, at the same time, to alleviate management costs, by transferring temporarily part of the space to others institutions or partners The construction time, conceived as part of the project, allows the use of the building throughout the construction phase.
An ideas contest, but also a view of a city to trace the future of a possible Venice.
