- Check out the ParadoXcity Venice Studio Submissions!
- Bricole-age takes the public infrastructure of channel markers in the Venetian Lagoon as its site. According to the Istituto Veneto, there are 6,768 channel markers in the Venetian Lagoon, each composed of at least three sixteen-foot oak posts about a foot in diameter. The exact number of these individual posts, called “bricola” (plural: bricolē), is unknown but could be as many as 90,000. On average, these posts last only three years before they must be replaced at a cost to the city and municipality of over four million Euros per year. In a city that is already drowning in maintenance costs, this represents a significant problem. Existing proposals call for the replacement of the historic wooden bricole with plastic replicas, estimated to have a lifespan of at least 10 years. Rather than seeking to imitate how the bricole look, this proposal seeks to understand how the bricole work, as a starting point for generating a proposal. This requires an understanding of the material and cultural history of Venice and its lagoon, as well as the economic and ecological balance that has been so essential to the success of the city. Much like the city itself, it is at the intersection of these forces that we find the bricole.
- Seth Denizen
- Terra Nova: building a new Venetian groundProject Statement: Venice symbolizes the strange beauty that is possible when human habitation adapts itself to extreme environmental surroundings. Sea level rise and climate change place the Venetian lagoon at a critical juncture in its existence and necessitate new techniques of adaptation. Terra Nova proposes a new, more flexible set of methods to build ground, improve biodiversity, and permit human access to this critical process in order to allow this very unique city and ecosystem to survive.
- Julia Price, Erin Root, Kurt Marsh
- ecological games without end Venice is intrinsically bound to the ecological processes of its site, the Lagoon. Our proposal extends the geography of Venice, conceptualizing the city as a nexus within the Lagoon’s complex, threatened territory. In reading the Lagoon as a series of relationships, the proposed intervention takes the form of principles for operating architecturally within the landscape at multiple scales – new rules for Venice’s ecological game without end.
Sarah Cancienne & Jen Lynch
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BACKGROUND Venice is a city that has existed as the product of the rituals of daily life. Human power and manual labor have been and continue to be the important source of energy for the city, and most of the movement of goods and services continue to happen at the body scale (carts, small boats, buckets). The once great Venice of the 14th and 15th centuries has gone into deep decline (and may never be so dominant again), and modern efforts to revive the city have failed. The petrochemical plant at Porto Marghera briefly augmented the economy of Venice and Mestre, yet brought great environmental damage to the lagoon and contributed to the subsidence of the city. Tourism provides the economic base of the current economy, but it arguably destroys as much as it supports.
Nicole Keroack & Alexa Bush
paradoXcity 