ADIP Magazine: Future Cities

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PLACETAKER FUTURE CITIES – Projects for the Giardini of Venice ADIP Magazine 4

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Editorial of ADIP Magazine Series Technische Universität Berlin ADIP - Architecture Design Innovation Program Birgit Klauck Sekr A 61, Straße des 17. Juni 152, 10623 Berlin Editors of this Edition

University cooperation Austria Technische Universität Graz Institut für Architekturtechnologie IAT | Prof Roger Riewe

Boštjan Vuga, Birgit Klauck, Monika Berstis, Uta Gelbke, Jan Grüneberg, Jasper Ugrinsky Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de/ abrufbar.

Germany Technische Universität Berlin Institut für Architektur | ADIP Prof Boštjan Vuga

Publisher AADR, Spurbuchverlag Am Eichenhügel 4 96148 Baunach Telefon: +49 (0) 9544 - 1561 Fax: +49 (0) 9544 - 809 E-Mail: info@spurbuch.de www.spurbuch.de Das Manuskript ist urheberrechtlich geschützt.

ISSN 2191-2017 ISBN 978-3-88778-409-6

Italy Università Iuav di Venezia Adjunct Prof Enrico Anguillari

Slovenia Univerza v Ljubljani | Fakulteti za arhitekturo Prof Tadej Glažar, Prof Jurij Sadar

Contents

Content 1 Editorial Boštjan Vuga Birgit Klauck 4 Strategies for a city without visions Luka Skansi 8 The City: an unfinished political project Uta Gelbke 12 Temporary Densities Roger Riewe 18 What about Venice?

Birgit Klauck

32 0 Month Scenario Ana Krec

78 12 Month Scenario Uta Gelbke

34 Culture Hub Urban Intervention

80 Biennale Infection Urban Intervention

38 Let's Dense Architectural Intervention

84 Pathogen Architectural Intervention

44 Global Link Architectural Intervention

88 Dissolve and Reconstruct Urban Intervention

48 Local Taste Urban Intervention

92 Dock Diffuser Architectural Intervention

52 My Market Architectural Intervention

98 Not Yet Pritzker Urban Intervention

58 1 Month Scenario Birgit Klauck

102 Transversal Dialog Architectural Intervention

60 Integration Urban Intervention

106 Exhibition Laboratory Architectural Intervention

24 Venice, Giardini and local inhabitants Tadej Glažar

64 Permeable Boundary Architectural Intervention

110 Denouement Uta Gelbke Birgit Klauck

26 Exhibition Devices Jurij Sadar

70 Cube and Path Architectural Intervention

30 Venice Map

74 Elanneib Urban Intervention

20 Venice after Venice.

Myths, rites, identities.

Enrico Anguillari

114 Planting Publicness Boštjan Vuga Credits | Imprint

Editorial Boštjan Vuga Birgit Klauck

In spring 2013 ADIP, Bostjan Vuga and Birgit Klauck of the Technische Universität Berlin initiated and conducted an EU-sponsored "Intensive Programme" in cooperation with the Università Iuav di Venezia, Univerza v Ljubljani, and Technische Universität Graz.

Under the title "Future Cities: Demographic change and local differentiation" the four Universities are dedicating a common architectural research program to the needs of cities without growth, cities in crisis and suffering from stagnation or decline. The program runs for 3 years in total and the key component is an annual 12-day workshop. In 2013 the workshop took place in the city of Venice which was simultaneously a case study city. 36 students with different academic backgrounds took part in this workshop, testing possible architectural strategies for encouraging sustainable renewal and overcoming the negative side effects of decelerated urban development.

Besides the urban dimension a further aim of the project was to intensify existing academic collaborations and to push intercultural exchange in the curriculum of each University.

Hence, after our arrival in Venice interdisciplinary mixed teams were formed, challenging the students to collaborate outside of their home institution in a foreign country with

colleagues from different backgrounds. They had the opportunity to work on-site, addressing the sometimes contradicting demands of local stakeholders and community members.

Unsurprisingly, advanced communication skills were required from every student taking part.

Still, not least because of the generous support of the Venetians, the teams mastered the task and produced a broad set of a design proposals with a focus on strategic implementation.

PLACETAKER for Future Cities For "case study Venice" the Biennale - its organization as well as its spatial representation in the city - was chosen as a theme for further speculation on the city’s future. In this context the Giardini area, well known for its historic peculiarities and disconnection from the rest of Venice, offered a perfect research setting.

The Giardini area was chosen as the “PLACETAKER” site with a focus on the set-up of Biennale events on the Giardini site.

“Place-taking” refers to an architectural or urban intervention which modifies the character of a place, opening it up and to transforming the place’s relationship to the city.

The Giardini has always been an structural exception, an island in the urban fabric of

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Venice. Developed during the Napoelon time on the site of the demolished Castello quarter, the Giardini represented a place of healthy and airy living, a heterotopian concept for the Lagoon city. The Giardini were designed for the public, for the city inhabitants.

However, these gardens were disproportioned to the city fabric, too big and decentralized with respect to the heart of Venice, and were never used as initially intended. At the end of the 19 th century many artists, writers, collectors, and art lovers made a pilgrimage to Venice, drawn by the city’s combination of historical landmarks and seaside resorts. The Giardini soon became attractive as an ample place for art exhibiting and in 1895 the first international exhibition of the arts was held there in a newly erected exhibition palace. This was the beginning of the Biennale, the oldest international arts exhibition.

During the 20th century thirty national pavilions were built on the site of the Giardini, thirty little embassies opening their doors during the arts and architecture Biennale to a constantly increasing flow of tourists, art lovers, and professionals. Five months a year, the Biennale exhibitions and activities in the Giardini become an attractor, a reason to travel to Venice. A flux of people wandering through

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pavilions of the Giardini and farther on to the exhibition in the renovated Arsenale brings a particular life to that part of Venice and back to the city beyond. This is in summer. In winter, the place completely hibernates behind an iron fence, apparently unapproachable, cut from the neighborhood and local context. The permanent site offers only temporal use!

Some locals say the city stops where the Giardini starts. The unheated and uninsulated pavilions offer no possibility for year-round use. Their maintenance is the responsibility of their respective owner countries, who have no interest in opening them for the locals during non-Biennale times. The Giardini are therefore always disconnected from the rest of the city: the fenced-in and controlled exhibition creates a barrier during summer and in winter all life behind the fence seems to vanish.

Combined with this phenomenological character, the size of the Giardini is appropriate for testing and demonstrating the generative power of an architectural project in the larger context of Venice.

Can the Giardini become an example how to deal with the shrinkage and social impoverishment of Venice?

Can the Biennale and its exhibitions become a catalytic urban activity?

Can we imagine a future in which people live in the Giardini and the Biennale occurs elsewhere?

What possibilities are there for the Giardini in the 21st century which correspond to the zeitgeist of today and take current urban conditions in Venice into account?

What is an architectural or urban design intervention which addresses the specific needs of different parties and communities involved in the Giardini?

These are the questions posed by this year’s Future Cities Intensive Programme and explored in this issue of the ADIP magazine. Titled "Projects for the Giardini of Venice” the focus of the workshop was architecture and its potential to trigger urban renewal. Within the context of the workshop a broad dialog was opened. Instead of imitating generalized work of urban planners, the student teams investigated the varied effects of potential architectural interventions on urban life in general and in particular on the dynamics of urban transformation on this specific site.

Most of the students’ proposed scenarios are time-based and imagine the transformation happening in stages. In some cases small architectural inventions mark important turning-points; their appearance stimu-

lates a cultural shift. Other teams envisioned bold proposals suggesting a 180° programmatic shift with emphasis on supporting the local community instead of the global cultural scene. All in all the project proposals present a wide range of possible answers, realizable in stages. The proposals have in common that they aim to find solutions which secure a sustainable future for cities no longer prospering, regardless of their location.

The Projects for the Giardini of Venice shall be therefore considered a design think-tank, reimagining this unusual site in the most replicated city in the world, a trigger for deeper discussion of the role of visionary architecture today.

Projects for the Giardini - online Reflecting the temporary and experimental character of the workshop, the immediate outcome was a movie presentation - first shown on the 11th of May 2013 in La Serra dei Giardini in Venice. The presentation is now published on the internet and for each project in the publication you’ll find a QR code leading directly to the correlating student presentation. http://www.adip.tu-berlin.de/futurecities/

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Strategies for a city without visions Luka Skansi

In recent years in Italy we are witnessing a constant and unstopping decline of the role of the architectural project, a crucial aspect in the strategic planning of our urban space. In the context of this publication, it is less important to know whether the reasons for the absence of strategies are hidden more in the hindering effects of the economic crisis, or in the protracted aftermaths of Berlusconism. What is important to recognize is that Italy has lost its hope for the possibility of a future for architecture, for the possibility of changing reality through ideas and actions expressed through the architectural project. All the initiatives made by politicians address imminent problems: paying debts, covering budgets, responding to urgent circumstances. We are faced with a constant emergency. Monetary, economic and naturalistic emergencies dominate our reflections on the city. The necessity for a vision, larger than that of the solution of the everyday externalities, seems to have disappeared from our vocabulary and is slowly and dangerously characterizing our generation.

Curiously, this condition finds itself parallel to the proliferation in the media, not only in Italy, of informations regarding architecture. The most important national newspapers, magazines, blogs and websites are all giving a lot of attention to presenting architectural projects and

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exhibitions and to interviewing architects, critics and opinion makers. Architecture was never so considered and discussed by the larger audience as today. However it is increasingly clear that this rising interest in architecture is not reflected in reality at all, and what’s worse, is not looking to change it. This interest reflects the typical media exploitation that treats architecture, design and art as part of a general trend, a matter of fashion. What media highlights are big names, superstar architectures and mundane events.

On the other hand, the role of the 99% of Italian architects has been dramatically marginalized in recent years. Exploited and underpaid, the architect has been definitively excluded from any decision: strategies and evaluations are being made by the administrative and political lobbies, without any consultation with professional advisors, experts in urban planning.

And architects, unfortunately, react passively to this situation, closing themselves in professional spheres and in the daily tasks of their small projects. Venice is a clear example of this general discourse. Its immobility and lack of strategy derive from the flat and never ending discussions among politicians, voters and local newspaper readers, regarding the colossal events that surround the city: the dams, the mastodontic tourist ships, the siege of tourism.

The future of the city is discussed only in banal

ill Demographic Change + Economics: the total built area of old town Venice equals 2,5 km2

political and ideological arguments, changing on the basis of the temporal proximity or distance from the local elections. Plans – mainly regarding tourism – are made within dominant lobbies, and their appeal is measured only by the reaction of the population through newspapers, a reaction that is often obtuse and conservative.

Everything goes on without any wider, strong and clear strategic vision for the future of the city, without any intent to include urban designers or architects in the discussion.

These “colossal” problems render other topics less and less important. As if blindfolded, politicians treat the “real” problems as marginal, problems that threaten the life of the city: the housing problem, population decline, modernization of Venetian infrastructure and the Lagoon’s sustainability issues. Ignored and left to the initiative of fewer and fewer Venetians or to academic investigation, the “real” topics are seen as crucial only in isolated communities. The strategies proposed in this publication, beginning in the workshop then leading to student projects, reflect this isolated, almost desperate need to rethink the future of the city.

Total Built Area = 2,5 km2

The Giardini park is one of those crucial parts of the city where we witness at the same time the incredible potential of Venice and its immobility.

The inability to rethink the spaces of the Biennale – apart from Stirling’s pavilion, nothing has substantially changed there since the 50’s – lies both in the previously mentioned lack of vision of our politicians, and in their deafness toward the ideas that come from experimentation and the work of architects. The student projects are in fact partially naïve and provocative. But this is their most sincere quality. They dare to imagine in a direction reality rarely goes, and they remind us how many possibilities we have to transform the future. They remind us how difficult and at the same time how necessary it is to broaden our visionary horizon for future strategy. This goes not only for Venice but for cities and regions worldwide. The solutions are not to be found in this publication, but in the constant process of questioning a city’s problems and potentials in a dialogue among all the constituencies of change.

Including, if not primarily, architects and their visions.

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On the Urban Dimension

The City: an unfinished political project Uta Gelbke

The Ancient Greek polis, the great medieval fortifications, the skyscrapers in our CBDs – cities have always been the medium and outcome of power relations. Their architectural and spatial parameters are the result of negotiations between authorities, institutions, planners, and capital. Cities are therefore the quintessential physical manifestation and representation of society, or in other words, cities are the site of the social. In fact, this intimate relationship of urban form and social practice is two-directional: the built environment is shaped by social relations and, in turn, shapes them.

Consequently, this renders the city the ideal testing ground for utopian concepts in architectural as well as political terms. If architecture, to a certain extent, influences how we live, then it seems only logical to imagine its modification in order to live better. Thus, the great utopian plans of the modernists were based on the assumption that a radically altered urban environment would generate a new society within its built frame. Of course, the schemes by Wright or Le Corbusier differed greatly with regard to spatial layouts and political views (1), yet they showed an equal dissatisfaction with the existing city. They created a new de-historicized and de-contextualized ideal and imposed it on both society and space.

Despite their intent of promoting an egalitarian society, these schemes must be understood as

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thoroughly authoritarian in nature, and therefore as a political act. Paradoxically, they contain a political dimension in two different and largely contradicting ways: they employ architecture as a means of achieving objectives of a more progressive and more equal society, yet their rigorous approach to social engineering signifies an act of totalitarianism.

This indicates why the great utopian plan has fallen into disgrace in the aftermath of modernism. It raises the question whether planning is necessarily linked to some form of authority, or whether multidimensional authorship is possible. The attempt at a more open concept – both architecturally and politically – emerged during the progressive political climate of the 1960s, as examples like Yona Friedman’s La Ville Spatiale explain. Similar to the modernists, Friedman regarded the traditional city an outdated model.

However, instead of replacing the existing with a glorious new spatial arrangement, he simply overlaid the historic core of European cities with an open, light-weight structural system that could be adapted to user needs through adjustable wall elements. The project marks a decisive change from conceiving the city as a product to conceiving the city as a process. Friedman’s concept questions, and finally denies, the authority of planners in the construction of the city: planners and their material products were only

Uta Gelbke, born 1979 in Berlin, graduated in Architecture from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She currently holds a position as Assistant Professor at Graz University of

to provide a framework in which individuals are free to manifest themselves physically. Notably, Friedman predicts a quality of urban space that only recently, under the significant influence of economic and political transformations, has become vital: the notion of Do-It-Yourself.

The final peak of visionary thought was followed by its plunge into depression. When the crisis of Fordism hit in the early 1970s, utopian thoughts were increasingly hard to come by and the link between space and society became irrelevant. Postmodernism attempted to liberate itself from social and political responsibility and the complete abandonment of utopian thought reveals that it succeeded. Overcoming modernist visions was accompanied by the disaffection with idealistic planning altogether and further encouraged by the collapse of the Eastern bloc, a significant caesura in the history of alternative concepts of society. The ideological breakdown of 1989 and the leveling we seem to experience in view of spreading liberal democracy, are directly linked to the lack of critical perspectives on the present and the lack of aspirations to establish new ideals. In political theory, this somewhat paralyzed situation is defined as the post-political condition. In architecture and urbanism, it is expressed by dismissing large-scale planning.

The disquieting apprehension, however, is that this negation of utopian thought might entail the

Technology. Her PhD research focuses on the correlations between the articulation of public space in urban regeneration projects and political dynamics on local level.

end of urbanism altogether, or in other words, the end of the city.

Spatial proximity is no longer a necessity for social contacts, consumption, or business matters. The decentralization of the urban form made possible by extensive traffic infrastructure and further facilitated by sophisticated communication networks, strives toward dissolving the distinction between city and countryside. Cities beyond urbanism seem to result in privatized, fragmented, and sprawling spatial patterns that not only stretch along the fringes of metropolitan areas in North America but also affect the inter-urban corridors of European cities while their central core with its administrative and cultural significance is tried to be kept alive through piecemeal regeneration projects. The discipline of urban planning, however, refrains from using strategic planning to counteract issues like sprawl, segregation and the voiding out of city centers.

Abandoning the traditional centralized layout of the city as well as strategic planning contains political dynamite. It might present itself as a radically democratic gesture yet, upon closer examination, it just seems to result in a deserted no-man’s land of no political value whatsoever.

The repetitive patterns of suburban areas – an endless sea of uniform tastes and life choices –

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1 Gieryn, Thomas F. “What Buildings do“ in: Theory and Society 31 (2002) pp.35-74, 41 2 While Wright’s Broadacre City advocates complete individualization on a de-centralized territory, La Ville Radieuse by Le Corbusier celebrated the great centralized and verticalized metropolis with a superior administrative structure.

3 See Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope (University of California Press, 2000) or Pinder, David.

"In Defence of Utopian Urbanism: Imagining Cities after the 'End of Utopia’” in: Geografisker Annaler. 84 B (3-4) (2002) pp.229-241 4 Harvey, David. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) p.436

rather generate conformity and subordination to the opinions of the majority. Facing these spatial and political challenges while avoiding the very notion of planning, the question arises: what else do we have to offer? Can we think of new ideals which truly acknowledge our fragmented urban realities and formulate a statement on how to proceed?

Cities are simultaneously imagined and real entities. The image of Venice, for example, as the "Queen of the Adriatic" is constituted by dreams as much as the built form. This goes to show that urbanism and utopianism are in fact two intertwined aspects. We need to continue formulating criticism of urban reality and imagining improvement. In this regard, scholars like David Pinder and David Harvey advocate the reconceptualization of utopianism in more processoriented ways (2). Their vision is not an ideal form of state or spatial structure but of a socio-spatial practice. It means grasping utopia as a transformative process, instead of a blueprint. This understanding further extends Friedman’s vision of the adjustable city. If classic utopia enforced repression through its spatial structures, a more open and flexible concept of utopia has the capacity to become meaningful in a political sense.

“Emancipatory politics calls for a living Utopianism of process as opposed to the dead Utopianism of spatialized urban form." (3)

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Considering the complexity of liberal capitalism and the array of problems it entails – from shifting markets to social discrepancies – architects and urban planners face a multitude of issues they cannot solve by the virtue of their discipline.

To imagine solutions solely on the grounds of architectural interventions would mean returning to the authoritarian models of modernism.

Here, a process-oriented understanding of utopia provides for a more relational approach to shaping the city and allows for adjustments along the way. This adaptation of the term to our times certainly resonates in the large variety of urban initiatives that have emerged in every major city over the last decade. They range from individual art projects to grassroots politics, from community gardens to self-organized, collaborative building projects. Some generate and tie an enormous level of local creativity, while others attend to the most pressing social issues of the community. DIY urbanism has emerged as a motif to express people’s mistrust of professional planning and their search for alternative ways of conceiving, constructing and living the city. DIY urbanism focuses, firstly, on social, cultural and political dynamics and, only on a secondary level, relates to the physical reconfiguration of urban layouts. These initiatives are manifold and it is impossible to summarize them under one criterion. The different ideas and groups are rarely connected, they tend to be

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Apartments San Marco

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Cannareggio Castello

Dorsoduro San Polo Giudecca

Lido (centre) Lido (suburbs) Mestre & Marghera (centre)

Mestre & Marghera (suburbs)

Shops

ill Demographic Change + Economics: Spreading of real estate prices (in EUR/m2) indicating a clear peak along the Grand Canal

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small-scale and spontaneous in nature, and their impact varies. So how can we rate their success?

If the process claims superiority over the goal, can DIY urbanism really become a new utopian vision? Is the mere attention to process appropriate for an environment that is first and foremost materialized in physical forms?

Even the most radical political thinkers like Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek state that emancipatory politics has to emerge on the grounds of some form of structure. The answer to the crisis of representative democracy cannot be a mere call for direct democracy. Likewise, the response to the shortcomings of the comprehensive plan cannot be a romanticized idea of DIY. Instead, it seems necessary to look at how we engage politically as well as spatially and improve the procedures of representative democracy/professional planning. The question is not how planners can reconfirm their value in the urban process. In my opinion, this stands undisputed. The concern must rather be how our professional knowledge could better integrate with the local knowledge of users in order to generate benefits and acceptance on local level.

Finding common ground between professional planning and local activism is the most critical issue urban environments are facing today. This means to address goal and process in equal measure. If professionals and locals manage to join forces, a new urban utopia might have the chance to write another meaningful chapter in the political project that is the city, one that is appropriate to its time and representative of its needs and potentials.

This publication investigates the potential of architectural artifacts’ triggering urban development, which implies the role of authorship, and thus authority, embedded in these artifacts. To what extent does architecture – the materialization of power relations – allow for appropriation and self-organization? The resulting projects range from addressing a variety of specific programmatic needs identified during field research to structures that are little more than a raised walkway yet offer space for various appropriations. Thus, this compilation of concepts can be understood as an attempt toward a more open and speculative approach to reading and planning the city.

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Temporary Densities Roger Riewe

Temporary major events have been established the world over. They have become fixtures in international, even global calendars, of organizers and consumers alike. In the context of sustainability, developments involving such extraordinary amplitudes are bad news. In the commercial world, too, sizeable short-term increases are generally not regarded as necessarily being conducive to business, implying, as they do, excessive concentration in a short period. But does that mean that all temporary major events should be judged unfavorably? Should cities and municipalities be advised not to hold major events?

Temporary major events are to a large extent manageable if they don’t develop spontaneously.

Given that they are manageable, profit and loss may also be predicted with a degree of certainty.

Hence, cities and municipalities, as organizers or location providers, can be integrated into the decision-making process as to whether they should hold major events of this kind or not.

Having combined its main event locations (the Congress, trade fair center, convention center, football stadium and ice-rink) in a single organizational unit, the city of Graz is in a position to locate its events in a very selective and customized manner. Thanks to the improvement of these facilities, it can hold conferences and other similar events for up to 3500 people. More than fifty per cent of visitors come from abroad,

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usually travelling by plane, which means around 1750 people arrive by plane on the day of the event or the evening before. With airline services to Munich, Frankfurt, DĂźsseldorf, ZĂźrich, Berlin and Vienna, Graz has relatively good links, but it is usually small planes that fly these routes. If an event starts at 9am, the visitor is forced to arrive the previous evening. Graz airport currently services around 21 destinations a day (incoming), with evening rotations accounting for around five flights. Five incoming flights in the evening can fly in around 450 passengers, which would mean a deficit of approx. 1000 passengers, without allowing for normal passengers. This reveals a serious bottleneck which has a major influence on the size of events in Graz. On the other hand, however, there are also bottlenecks with regard to overnight accommodation. Graz has some 5600 beds, of which around half of which are in the 3 - 4 star category, the category most frequented by conference participants. Here again, it is obvious that this bottleneck can also have a limiting effect on major events. What we see is that an overarching system of management is required in order to establish temporary major events in Graz. Improving event locations, promoting the local soft facts (historic city center, wine and wellness, golf) and the necessary cooperation with transport operators, be it airlines or railways, are essential in order to carry out temporary major events.

ill Demographic Change + Economics: Daily population density for Venice in comparison to public and built area

Roger Riewe, born 1959 in Bielefeld, Germany, graduated from the RWTH Aachen School of Architecture. In 1987, he and Florian Riegler cofounded the

By focusing specifically on the annual Hajj to Mecca, the organization of global travel firms was one of the factors in turning this pilgrimage into a mega-event of unparalleled dimensions. As many as three million Muslim pilgrims embark on the Hajj every year to visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, with some 70% coming from outside Saudi Arabia, generally arriving by plane. Numerous special flights are scheduled to Mecca and Jeddah (around 300 passengers per plane) to convey the global streams of pilgrims to Mecca in a very short period. Roughly two million pilgrims are accommodated in Mina, a tent city in the neighborhood of Mecca and Medina, where pilgrims from more than 160 countries are accommodated in some 40,000 (high-tech) tents.

Maximum professionalism is required when it comes to overall logistics on site and to operating supply and disposal infrastructures, and transportation. Complicating matters, people speak more than one hundred languages in a very small area during this period! Providing drinking water and food, on the one hand, and setting up tents and running buses, on the other, are incredible challenges to be tackled by the organizers every year anew. Temporary major events which have evolved from a tradition, for instance the carnival

architectural office Riegler Riewe. Since 2001, he is professor and head of the Institute of Architecture Technology at the Graz University of Technology.

5,8 km2 total area

3,3 km2 free area 2,5 km2 built area 1,7 km2 public area 5 m2 per person

in Rio or Cologne, are more stable with regard to positioning and organization than those temporary major youth culture events such as raves and festivals. Carnival, whilst originating from a tradition, not only serves a local community, but also attracts large numbers of tourists. This was one of the reasons for reanimating the carnival in Venice. But certain sporting event formats such as the City Marathon have also become global players in tourism. The focus here is above all on a form of city marketing in which the city scenery plays a special role as a backdrop for the event.

Cities unsuited to this kind of running event, for example Venice, spend days building a course offering suitable conditions for the runners while at the same time creating a telegenic setting.

Temporary densities, well-planned, can doubtless constitute an added value for cities and municipalities. The monetary aspect – along with the concomitant indirect returns – is not the only one of importance in this respect, but equally so the emotional identification of local residents.

Cancelling the Cologne Carnival would probably lead to a collective depression of the Cologne populace!

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On the City of Venice

What about Venice?

Birgit Klauck

The global economic crisis has affected large metropolises as well as rural areas or middle sized cities. Various scientific conferences, symposia and recent publications address the topic.

Not surprisingly in this context the hypothesis "Cities in Crisis" which we last heard in the mid 1980s pops up again.

Yet we have to take into account that the effects caused by this phenomenon differ considerably depending on specific local conditions. In the case of Venice what we see is far from economic stagnation. After the first shock Venice's economy picked up fast, due to the apparently everbooming tourist industry. Tourism and cruises together with art exhibitions represent a growing economy which interestingly enough granted Venice a record high number of visitors in 2012.

Still the question may be asked, is this a stroke of luck for Venice?

Mass tourism, so what?

Obviously, first and foremost the tourist economy causes enormous imbalances with a severe impact on demographic development, and on the city structure. Each day more than 60,000 people visit Venice - more than the entire population of the city. The famous Italian port has become the most popular cruise destination in Europe.

Imbalances are not a desirable condition in general and in this particular case Venice is facing

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transformation into a tourist showcase rather than into a well functioning Future City. For many Venetians it is no longer an attractive place to live and work. Venice’s unique restricted situation in the lagoon offers no space for growth and locals have little chance of avoiding the growing mass of tourists. The municipality has no clear strategy for moderating the impact of this economic shift, not to mention the impact of climate or demographic change.

Summarized, old town Venice is in crisis. The adaptation of its urban structure is overdue but there is no sustainable strategy at hand and, more significantly, no vision for the future.

Urban innovation - What for?

One might ask, what has the municipality of Venice done so far to fight this crisis? In view of the challenges it is worthwhile recalling its recent history and focusing on the great industrial boom in the late 19th century. Up until the end of the 20th century Venice’s urban growth was largely determined by industry’s needs and complementary activities. Initiated by the development of ports, waterways, and railways, large plants appeared on the edges of the city - Giudecca, Santa Marta, Cannaregio, Castello.

After World War II Venice could not meet the demand for more space any longer due to the limitations of its unique lagoon location. Indus-

ill Demographic Change + Economics: Tourist influx versus Venetian population timeline from 1951 to 2004

trial activities were moved to Marghera and the ties of existing industrial plants in (old town) Venice with those in Marghera needed to be improved. The focus of the urban development shifted. Idle plants located inside the old town became available for urban transformation. With this relocation of production facilities a great opportunity arose. In total more than 70 hectares (Arsenale area excluded) became virgin territories. This was more or less 100 times the area of St. Mark's Square. The Venetian municipality recognized the opportunity and in the 80ties a catalog of all idle plants was commissioned.

With the turn of the millennium almost all these sites have been retrieved for different functions and activities: hotels, education facilities, shipyards, management activities, a few social housing projects - some more, some less successful. But for all this, to date there is a definite lack of space(s) for public functions and also for programmatic interventions which would serve the local communities as well as the non-tourist oriented businesses. It has become clear that the attractive prospects which tourism offered were hindering a well balanced transformation of the

Birgit Klauck, has been a member of ADIP since 2004. In 2011 she initiated this EU sponsored

IP Future Cities: demographic change and local differentiation, together with Prof Bostjan Vuga.

city. The relocation of industries is just the beginning of a major sell-off of Venice.

Old town Venice is losing its inhabitants. Local neighborhoods are being destroyed and replaced by short term tourism along with all the negative side effects of such a development. The few areas and buildings still available or vacant, at best, are assimilated by private foundations (Punta della Dogana: Pinault Foundation, Arsenale: Venice Biennale), but more often they are seen as opportunities for financial speculation.

Right now Venice is at a tipping point, shifting towards a Disney-like copy of itself - creating an illusionary world is falsely viewed by politicians, planners and members of the administration as an urban renaissance for the city. In this context urban innovation is more relevant than ever.

The crisis might be taken as an opportunity to do things differently, to learn from the past and from other best-practice projects. If the municipality together with local players are not driving innovation and its implementation, private investors can hardly be expected to do so.

This text is based on explanatory notes by Enrico Anguillari dealing with the recent urban development of Venice.

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Venice after Venice.

Myths, rites, identities.

Enrico Anguillari

About twenty years ago, Michel Foucault’s essay Heterotopia was published for the first time in Italian. The volume in which it was published addresses the problem of heterotopias in the context of the contemporary urban horizon and unravels the idea of heterotopic cityspace in a conversation about Venice between Aldo Bonomi and Massimo Cacciari (1).

Heterotopia is an anti-utopia. If utopia is a hope without a place, then heterotopia constitutes an excess of realized ideas, a space of crisis and a concentration of experiences.

The reasons that Bonomi and Cacciari give for describing Venice as a model of a heterotopic city-space seem to me to be even more current today, and are of great use in defining the context in which the scenarios and projects collected in this book have taken shape.

"The priests change but the idols remain the same", writes Cacciari.

Location - In the arc of its history, Venice, the Serenissima, has defined its role as a dominant city.

Today, Venice-after-Venice is the daughter of this inheritance, and she finds herself trying to carve out a new “spatial location” that will reformulate her image in the eyes of the world.

The problems which need to be confronted emerge, however, from a substantive conflict

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between visions of the future and sophistications of the past.

Myths and rites - In this search of a new “spatial location”, ideological conflicts emerge "between the devoted descendants of time and the avid inhabitants of space", writes Foucault; between those who feed "the myths of memory" and those who feed "the rites of tourism", paraphrases Bonomi.

The tendency to express the myth through Venice’s past stems from a substantive inability to imagine a new “spatial location”, or from an identity crisis that runs deep through the social sentiments of the city, resulting in conflicting emotional states.

Emotions - The first emotional state revolves around nostalgia and offers the city up to the modern rite of mass tourism. Interests that attach the image of Venice to the myth of decadence coalesce around this state.

Opposed to this nostalgic state is the state of courage, connected to social groups which are calling for action to ensure that Venice returns to representing itself once again. From this point of view, there is no need to make a spectacle of Venice; the city itself is the event. For some, this translates into the idea of the city

Enrico Anguillari graduated in Architecture from Iuav University of Venice where he received a Ph.D. in urban design coordinated by Bernardo Secchi (2007).

Since 2010 he teaches at University of Camerino, at Iuav in Ve-

as a container (candidacies for the EXPO, the Olympics, the European Capital of Culture; or seeing the city as a center for international congresses, etc.). For others, this means the city is a diffuse museum: a mechanism for gaining knowledge and for enjoying the city as an event in and of itself.

Finally, the third emotional state is connected to the solidarity of inter-linked entrepreneurs fighting to keep Venice alive. Palazzo Grassi, first with Fiat and then with François Pinault, Punta della Dogana, il Moro di Venezia by Giardini/Montedison, and il Fondaco dei Tedeschi

by Benetton, combine the myth of Venice’s past with the modern logic of spectacle-making, sometimes trivialized in the relationship between urban modernization and marketing.

Conflicts - The use of myth of the past, as message and image, substantiates conflicts between two opposed interests: the museum and the territory, that is to say, between those who advocate the self-referentiality of Venice, and those who argue that the city today should be considered a resource that can be used as a driving force in the development of the surrounding territory.

On the side advocating self-referentiality are the tour operators, the mask shops, the market stalls, and the gondoliers, as well as, to a

nice and University of Florence.

His research has been published in numerous books and articles and selected for the 5th International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam – Making City (2012)

lesser extent, the producers of art and culture.

On the other side are the centers of study and research, the advocates of urban marketing, the public relations agencies, and the universities.

Simulacrum - Nonetheless, it seems evident today that Venice has been reduced to a touristic space, a simulacrum of a city.

The loss of the city’s useful functions due to the growth of its symbolic exchange value – heterotopic – has caused the inhabitants to either leave the city or to reassert a lost identity: being Venetian. Considering the weakness of the social and cultural infrastructures, however, the strong reaffirmation of this identity creates a paradox.

In heterotopic places such as Venice, one either flees or abandons oneself to paradoxes such as this.

Neuroses - The socio-cultural impact of tourism on the organism of Venice has triggered aggressive reactions typical of neurosis and has caused the citizens to assume a fractured identity.

The city is split over the problem of tourism into two camps: those who live by tourism and those who see tourism as an erosion of vital

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spaces. The euphoric exploit the opportunities offered by tourism. The apathetic don’t work for any benefit, but profit from tourism all the same. The angry complain about the inconvenience. Those opposed to mass tourism see it as the root of all evils in the city. The apocalyptic argue that Venice is caught up in an irreversible mutation both anthropological and morphological.

Citizenship - The pact between the city and tourism has, at this point, reached an irreparable rupture, as can be seen by comparing the constantly increasing number of visitors to the constantly decreasing number of residents.

Attempts were made, in the past, to actively

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invent a new, intermediate population and create a new citizenship.

The first attempt was centered around the Consorzio Venezia Nuova, and was focused on the environment and the fragility of Venice with emphasis on the landscape, the artifice of the area, and the defense of the lagoon.

Another attempt at forging a pact was made between the city’s heritage, research institutions, and businesses. This attempt hoped to be capable of building a new representation of Venice by placing the city-museum side by side with the city of science, using the universities as a focal point.

Other attempts was aimed at creating a “spatial location” defined through Venice’s relationship with the world outside of it. As was the

ill Demographic Change + Economics: Timeline for Venice indicating milestones in urban transformation

case with tourism, the goal was the value of the symbolic exchange of Venice, trying to fold the symbol into the rite of the market. Thus, Venice would be the pole of a dynamic and polycentric system covering mainland Veneto as well as the center of its own metropolitan area.

Monoculture - Yet, today, it seems that little of this process - aimed at living in a heterotopia remains. Lacking both change and a vision for the future, it’s clear that a monoculture will persist; a monoculture which defends the location rent, dedicating itself to tourism and to the jungle of commuters, feeding into the system of “bite and run” day-to-day usage of the city.

These denizens of monoculture are the true inhabitants of Venice as a heterotopic space.

Illusions - If a city becomes a heterotopic space, the only dominant feeling that can exist is nostalgia.

The students’ works collected in this book, however, push towards a subversion of this principle, affirming the need of rediscovering the ability of illusion. They urge us not to avoid, but to enter into the heterotopic space, breaking the simulacrum of a space devoid of social dynamics. They tell us that it is necessary to form a social path starting with the weak identity of Venice, inhabiting and rendering alive the place, acknowledging that the city’s nature today is no longer commercial, real estate, administrative, touristic, or made up of location rent, but is a syncretic shape made up of a past of which the memory has been lost and a future which is uncertain and dubious.

1 Foucault Michel, Eterotopia. Luoghi e non-luoghi metropolitani, in: millepiani, 2-1994, Mimesis, Milano. ill San Cristoforo, San Michele and Murano from Fondamenta Nove, Canaletto, 1725-30, elaboration by Federico Gobbato, 2013

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Venice, Giardini and local inhabitants Tadej Glažar

Venice an unfinished project?

While writing this article I am sitting in the fishermen town of Komiža, on the island of Vis, in the middle of the Golfo di Venezia, today Adriatic sea. While the whole sea was named after a city, or better after the archipelago of islands that together form a specific metropolis called Venezie, it seems that Venice has completely opened development to the future.

In Komiža, Venitians started to build a small fortress but never finished it. Finally, it was

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ill Map of Venezia - Giardini and Castello in the 1920s

ill 1

Venice is an incredible situation where islands form a unique habitat so present by island conditions that even the extensive bridge connecting Venice with the mainland was not able to make Venice a coastal place.

Predrag Matvejevi´c, a charismatic fan of islands and a man with "islomania illness" stated in his favourite book Mediterranean Breviary (1987): "Nothing reflects the destiny of the Mediterranean as truthfully as its islands. [...]

Even the very notion of island is difficult to capture. On one hand, they can be a place of peace and meditation, of love, happiness or bliss. On the other hand, they can be a place of exile or imprisonment, of chastisement, expiation or patience. This is how they have been perceived since the dawn of time."

finished by local people from the island.

Can one call the phenomena of Venice an unfinished project? Is the Giardini area presenting this "infinity" of the city on smaller but international scale, being an island in an island, where one constantly rebuild and demolish in the form of a Venice Biennale event?

Where do local inhabitants position themselves in all of this? Most of them escaped from labyrinths that became almost unbearable.

Labyrinths full of tourists and over-scaled cruise ships that literary make the city a kind of Potemkin village, where the local people are pushed to the edge. This situation confirms that "the misfortunes of an island starts elsewhere, outside island itself."

ill Demographic Change - Economics: Venice is made up of 113 islands with 5,8 km2 total area

However one of the most significant products of Venice's long and bloody centuries is its people's belief in their own power, in their intuitive comprehension of themselves as the subjects and objects of history, and in their rekindled imaginations. People's capacity for collective action stands out as a great legacy of their past struggles.

The fact is that we have to act positively. According to the French philosopher Alain Badiou, we have to use affirmative dialectics and to reverse this logic of classical dialectics, "so that the affirmation, or the positive proposition, comes before the negation instead of after it." What is being affirmed is an opening or event that creates a possibility for some kind of radical change: "An event is simply that which interrupts the law, the rules, the structure of the situation, and creates a new possibility."

Professor Tadej GlaĹžar studied at University of Ljubljana Faculty of Architecture and Berlage Institute Amsterdam and worked with Hertzberger, Neutelings, Christiaanse. Since

1994 he teaches at the Faculty of Architecture in Ljubljana and simultaneously practices as an architect. In 1998 he became editor of the Croatian architectural magazine ORIS.

But because we don't have the right words or concepts to understand the event and only come to understand it after the fact, we miss the momentary opening in which an alternative, another world, became possible.

I believe that some of the student projects challenged the possible future. Especially those which engage with the local population and resources that can give power to the transformation and turn in the curse of more natural living in this specific environment so fragile as it can be where sea meets land.

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Exhibition Devices Jurij Sadar

Art Institution - Public Space The important and famous art institution buildings are historically positioned in the center of our cities because they house the most important treasures of the city, region or country.

These buildings create the backbone of a city's urbanity and connect to the public spaces that have the form of a big square or a central green area. Today, many new buildings of that type and importance are built for cultural events such as art fairs or to house important art collections. The sites are often found on left over spaces like industrial sites, army barracks or docklands. They act as generators for urban transformation of the particular area or even the whole city. The best-known examples are the Bilbao Guggenheim and the Kunsthaus Graz.

The combination of art institutions with public space in relation to the city is one of the central themes of urban planning and architecture.

Three projects are presented here that deal with this topic in different ways. They were built or planned at different times and places, but can still be used as case studies for the projects on the Giardini of Venice.

Parallel to the new typologies of these buildings lies a constant search for new types of public space in order to accommodate contemporary social habits – whether it be a multifunctional event space for the youth, new ways of getting together or new types of sports. They relate to their specific climatic conditions. The relation between the building's indoor space and the outdoor public space becomes interconnected. The relaxed usage of open spaces is in constant dialog with the more focused and contemplative experience of exhibition spaces.

The Grande Marquise in Sao Paolo is a covered pathway in the shape of a concrete canopy that floats through the park and links various art pavilions, restaurants, and utilities. It is a covered public space of grand dimension. Every day skateboarders, cyclists, athletes, and families who visit the park and art events gather under it.

The canopy provides shading and shelter in the ever-changing tropical climatic conditions of Sao Paolo. The canopy is just high enough to allow natural light in and natural ventilation to

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The grande Marquise - Ibarapuera Park Ibarapuera Park is a major urban park in the center of Sao Paolo that was inaugurated in 1954.

It is an area for leisure, jogging and walking, but also houses a convention center and art institutions such as the Museum for Modern Art and the Art Biennial pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer.

Jurij Sadar graduated from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1988. From 1993 to 1997 he worked as an independent architect and assistant at Faculty of Architecture in Ljubljana. In 1996

he co-founded the architectural office SADAR+VUGA. Since 2012, he's taught at the Faculty of Architecture in Ljubljana. Today he holds the position of an Assistant Professor.

ill Covered public space of The Grande Marquise in Ibarapuera Park, Sao Paolo, Brazil by Oscar Niemeyer

pass through and cool down the heat. The space below the canopy offers long panoramic views of the park’s greenery.

The space of the Grande Marquise has to be experienced in order to understand it. When the rain begins, the space bellow the canopy fills up with people seeking shelter. Then a variety of activities begin as if on a stage. When the rain stops the people disappear again. With its scale and openness it provides a safe space within a dangerous city.

21st Century Museum The art gallery in Kanazawa is a big and positive surprise. The city of Kanazawa is relatively small and very traditional but also a very vibrant city on Japan’s west coast. It is famous for its beautiful gardens and medieval castle in the city center.

The area is encircled by a ring road. Next to it lies the new museum site.

The project’s zoning is radial. The central area houses the permanent collection. It is orga-

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ill Section through Urban Park Metelkova showing multiple activities and urban densities ill 21st Century Museum in Kanazawa, Jp. by SANAA - showing the closed cubical space in contrast to outdoor green spaces

nized as a set of closed cubical spaces and open atriums. The second area is composed of a ring that runs around the central core and houses a set of indoor spaces. These either open or enclosed spaces are programmed as an entrance, a shop, a cafeteria, workshops, a library, or other multipurpose spaces. The third area is the outdoor green space that acts as a buffer between

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the road and the building. It also acts as a place to gather and play. Art installations in the park stimulate activities and encourage people to interact.

The whole complex enables interaction between visitors of the exhibitions, people who attend daily activities, and passersby. The transparent and open character of the building enables visual contact and the interplay of activities while the public, semi public, and the private domain are blurred, putting the leisure of the visit in contrast to the focus of art contemplation.

Urban Park Metelkova The competition in Ljubljana to redevelop two city blocks (40,000 m2) used the military’s old headquarters in the center of an institutional (the Museum of Modern Art, Ethnographic Museum, depots of the National Museum, the Academy for Theatre, Movie and TV) and non institutional (Centre of Alternative Culture) cultural complex to test the city’s urbanity and its ability to have public and private investors work together.

In general, military quarters in cities are closed and strictly controlled zones – physically and mentally breaking the urban environment.

They act as self-sufficient islands connected

to their surroundings with few access ways and entrances with small porters windows. By vacating the headquarters it is assured that these black dots on the city aerial will used for further development and urban condensation.

The development of the Metelkova area is a proposal for Ljubljana’s new cityscape. It is an urban park with a zone for multiple activities and urban densities that lays at the edge of Ljubljana.

The separation of the six army offices and dormitory buildings creates a rigid city block to the south of the site and fragmented service buildings to the north. This creates a disconnect between the institutional and the noninstitutional part of the cultural complex. It is clearly overwhelmed by the inserting of a continuous urban surface organized in southnorth parallel bands that extend throughout the site. By cutting the parallel bands, a folding of the required program installments above and under the surface is achieved as well as a continuous walkway along it. The different configurations of the parallel bands provides for natural exposure of space under the surface.

bigger spaces and tied together by the use of retail spaces. This allows for a smooth transition between different activities. A transversal performance of each programmatic entity and configuration of the bands, as well as the continuity of the open roof surface, creates an interdependence and independence of events occurring in the differently scaled spaces and linked with walkways that run through or above.

The urban park Metelkova is a place of different intensities that vary according to their time and particular area. At night it functions as a disco, which is more crowded than when it functions as an observation point during the day. It is a meeting place for events and workshops, of leisure, and entertainment. It provides a summer cinema, a free climbing wall, a garden with tomato and zucchinis, and a jogging track.

The program distribution is perpendicular to the bands’ direction and develops below the surface. The culture programs are housed in

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architecture design innovation

program

PLACETAKER: Projects for the Giardini of Venice is part of the "Future Cities” program, an architectural design research project that responds to the needs of cities in crisis and cities suffering from stagnation or decline.

PLACETAKER refers to architectural and urban interventions that modify the character of a place in order to open it up and transform its relationship to a city. In the particular case of Venice, the Biennale, its organization as well as its spatial representation in the city, was chosen as a theme for further speculations on the future of the city.

Adip Magazine 4 – PLACETAKER: Projects for the Giardini of Venice is edited

by Prof Boštjan Vuga and Birgit Klauck. Contributors include Prof Enrico Anguillari, Uta Gelbke, Prof Tadej Glažar, Birgit Klauck, Ana Krec, Prof Roger Riewe, Prof Jurij Sadar, Prof Luka Skansi, and Prof Boštjan Vuga.

FUTURE CITIES is funded by the German Academic Exchange Program DAAD with support from the European Commission and is a collaboration between Technische Universität Berlin, Germany; Technische Universität Graz, Austria; Università iuav di Venezia, Italy; and Univerza v Ljubljani, Slovenia.

ADIP Magazine is a periodic publication edited by the Architecture Design Innovation Chair ADIP. It is a platform for the exploration of new concepts and designs in architecture in the School of Architecture at the Technische Universität, Berlin. Each issue is dedicated to a specific topic or research focus. Earlier publications in the series include RETHINKING BERLIN by Jean-Philippe Vassal, and PLACE-ACTIVATOR by Boštjan Vuga. © ADIP Magazine is published by ADIP, the Architecture Design Innovation Program at the School of Architecture, Technische Universität Berlin and AADR – Art Architecture Design Research (Spurbuch Verlag).

AADR publishes innovative artistic, creative and historical research in art, architecture, design and related fields. www.spurbuch.de