Fragments like new ruins

In part of the lagoon, to the south of Venice extending toward Lido, there was an island, Poveglia: “marvelously imitated rock … rays of the sun … landscape”, these ones are all significant elements of the site, in the same way as they were for Marcantonio Michiel at the sight of Three philosophers of Giorgione’s painting in the house of Taddeo Contarini in Venice.

The proposal for the new campus is materialized through a green park of monumental landmarks which welcomes knowledge place, where new architectures are surrounded by nature, one on top of the other interconnected by a network of linked and continuous courtyards. So can be seen the new Poveglia, pars pro toto, as the emblem of a process of continuing growth and reinvention of the Venetian forma urbis.

Architectures surrounded by nature, fragments like new ruins, such as tangent volumes to horizontal green breaks, circumscribe the new courtyards: elements almost disappeared today except in the gardens of the convents. These structures, mindful of the Venetian lagoon garden, hortus conclusus of medieval origins, whose form reflects the urban system of the insulae, welcome the new places of “delizie”. An architecture capable of preserving the richness and uniqueness of the place while revealing unexpected landscapes that each hides.

The campus typology is based on the principles of the courtyard and is composed of various pavilions, existing or new, both with green spaces featured strongly: an almost wild nature on the island edges alternates with more regulated internal geometries where to accommodate the pleasure gardens, wild thickets or simple breaks into the green, like contemplation places.

Therefore the courtyards system, like as internal generator system, becomes the central public meeting place for students, staff, scientists, and professors to share ideas or socialize. While towards the edges of the island, the architectures, the monolithic red brick volumes which observe the lagoon through large “oci”, stops of a visual journey, in a fruitful isolation with multiple looks towards the world.