Thresholds. Rest and Waiting Spaces in Post-Covid Venice

Architecture is to confine a space, a fundamental act that determines the passage from a place to another. This transitional movement is carried out by the threshold device. Due to social distancing and sanitization prescriptions imposed by the pandemic, the experience that can be perceived today in these places of passage seems to have suddenly expanded, acquiring a completely new dimension, deep and articulated, that becomes interesting to explore for an architect. The W.A.Ve. 2020 design workshop has been the opportunity for reflection on this scenario. It was conducted at the IUAV University of Venice from the 6 to the 24 July 2020 by a broad working group of 43 people including 37 students together with Professor Francesco Cacciatore, and the architects Giorgia Cesaro and Alessandra Rampazzo. This design simulation was carried out in the post-covid Venice, a way to keep the attention alive on a city that is both extraordinary and fragile, and which, however, can represent an alternative model of environmental sustainability and social revamping. 50 threshold places were selected within the historic city, representing four types of typical public space devices or sites of potential public use in the lagoon city: the altana/terrace, the portego/ sotoportego, the raft/dock, the bridge/gangway. Obviously, the identification of each device took us to broaden the investigation and design reflection to the contiguous and surrounding places. These areas were studied and examined in the first week of the workshop, but only 18 of these areas were finally subjected to an in-depth investigation and planning by 18 student groups. In such a consolidated and stratified background as the lagoon is, the work developed from the idea that the space in Venice already exists, and it is only a matter of colonizing it and imagining a new use through the addition of simple devices which can articulate it and enrich its use. By doing so our body can experiment and use space in a different and new way. The idea of temporariness and reversibility of interventions can be traced in the different project proposals systematically. The work, carried out remotely, required the questioning of a well-established didactic methodology within the context of the design workshop, which considers the mock-up the privileged operational tool, for its concrete ability of analogically prefiguring architectural space. On this occasion, instead, the representation and design communication were entrusted to the more abstract mode of the drawing. Thanks to this design operation, which confirms all the centrality that drawing has always played within the process of representing the architectural project, it is possible to rediscover the pleasure of designing the city and, especially, of designing Venice. Possibility that, by itself, offers endless opportunities, suggestions and solutions of fostering the architectural project.