Into the Storm. A Guide for a Crossing Through the Venetian Wilderness. Architectures: 1979-1999

Venice oscillates between two main images, that of the city of Venezia, subject to continuous environmental alterations, and that defined by the slogan Venice, besieged by crowds of tourists. Between the folds of the two images lies a third, often coinciding with the figures proposed, capable of expressing the real condition in which the two forms come to life. It is the wilderness that constitutes the third lens, intended to be an “agglomeration of ‘zones’ in which it is easy to get lost, but also an ‘environment’ that can be crossed by drawing lines of incursion. To inhabit the wildness means increasing the capacity for recognition, defining modes of coexistence; fundamentally, a ‘new alliance’ is called for” (Marini 2020, 15). Discovering Venezia according to this system provides an armamentarium of elements intended for the project where the cross-reference is life, movement, storm, and darkness. Crossing the storm, devising lines of incursion, is the pretext for rereading the figure of Venezia, a dimension in which the project grows, develops, that is, that setting where the signs and actions of the architecture that uses the metaphor of the outpost – the project of conflict – to spatially propose a possible salvation or survival find their place.