The Memory of the Unbuilt
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January 2023
Arsenale di Venezia, Italy
TEAM:
Marco Frassetto
Riccardo Giuseppe Meneghello
Sara Raffaglio
Savelii Siniagin
Vimal Tharani Kumar
Professors
Luca Cardani
Federico Bucci
The main theme on which the design is based is the one of duality, given by the analysis of the site and the Arsenale in its totality. The same duality that is often present in the Milanese school works with the play of rules and transgressions of them, technology and historical quotes, human scale and out-of-scale elements. A system of twins, doubles, and opposites exists all around the Torre Dell’Arsenale, one of the biggest structures that are part of this part of the city, a building designed for boat construction that becomes a lone landmark. Twins are the two XIX century towers at the entrance by the water of the Arsenale, placed on opposite sides of the canal, so are the hangars or the warehouses, the actual Italian pavilion is composed of two twin spaces that originally were opposites (one a water basin and the other a land tongue outside the borders of Arsenale). The pavilion proposed the reconstruction of an ideal missing half of the main tower, never completed, on the other side of the nowadays disappeared boundary wall.
The pavilion is a mirroring image of the tower base, placed exactly mirroring the floorplan and its original twin. But the addition is not actually adherent to the eastern wall of the Torre dell’Arsenale, is slightly detached to represent the historical boundary wall that for centuries divided the Arsenale from the open sea until its further expansion in the XIX century. A wall that shaped and dictated the land organization on both sides for more than 300 years and suddenly disappeared. Because of this asset, the Milanese School Pavilion enacts different roles: an instrument to help visualize and communicate the Arsenale history, an arrival point for visitors wanting to visit the other side of the canal, a different viewpoint of the Arsenale basin, and the monumental presences on both shores, possibly a first visitable space for the visitors arriving by water.
From a technical point of view, the essential characteristic of the pavilion is the presence of two structures: the main one sustains the horizontal slabs (roof and floor) hidden behind the understructure of the vertical panels, made out of smaller elements but densely packed. The two systems are independent and associated to different functions but collaborate to articulate, organize and divide both physically and visually the inside space of the pavilion, measuring the space and its proportion, learning from the lessons that Albini’s exhibitions offer to us.
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