Visions of an Imagined Venice Suspended Between Memories and New Possibilities

This paper investigates the composition of heterogeneous fragments, excerpts from the inventory of collective memory, and the resulting unpredictable architecture in an urban context. The project focuses on the city of Venice, its medieval urban tissue, its Renaissance and Baroque works. The freedom to assemble figures or fragments, to place them in another context, highlighted the effectiveness and decisiveness of a reading of urban design in which the figurative force is the result of consideration based on the visual relationships between objects. The experiences presented outline certain unreal circumstances, but nevertheless inspire a scale evaluation of the results of planned modifications, and suggest corrections, adjustments and new possibilities. The experimental setting, that some may deem fantastical, is derived from the superimposition of an existing environment and works introduced from other contexts. In this way, the artist can redesign and foreshadow, creating a fictional city that can paradoxically serve as a reference in the development of new possible urban settings. The juxtaposition of well-known architectures to provide form to new spatial connections in the environment verifies new unthought-of opportunities to compose buildings and monuments that modify the space. The inventions resulting from the union of individual architectures into unitary visions that do not organically belong together is a particular iconography in which buildings abandon the passive and ornamental function thanks to which we have got to know them and reacquire an actively elevated role in the project. A similar procedure that tests the possibility of enhancement of the context and the monument was experimented by the greatest architect of romantic classicism, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and can be seen in one of his best known designs called Large composition, how Milan Cathedral should be situated (1810). So the monument of the Lombard city is represented on a hill that overlooks a large city on the coast, perhaps Trieste, in order to test a new version of the relationship, here between architecture and nature. It is one of the most well-known anticipated explorations carried out in the past in a planning method facilitating upstream project verification aimed at the evaluation on the one hand of the impact of a new architecture on the environment, and on the other hand, of the opportunity to enhance a given place.