Output details

Law-Court Offices in Venice: an example of TransationArchitectureTM

Questioning the given site and program during the competition, we designed a physical 'adapter' in a unique, leftover space in the dense urban landscape of Piazzale Roma. We chose the word adapter to signify a physical configuration of a translation. The word is composed of two syllables: ad and apt. We interpret apt as a soft technological element, an infrastructure necessary for a dialogue between incompatible systems. This allows connections and creates understanding without threatening the identity of each system. Ad is understood as both an addition and an advertisement, related to communication and manipulation. LCV aims to be an adapter between programs, scales, typologies, and, from a broader perspective, between historical memory and the contemporary. While its scale is based on the huge void of Piazzale Roma, Law-Courts offices Venice (LCV) responds to the dense Venetian urban system. The new program proposes a hybrid typology: a building housing the law-court offices; an infrastructure housing the technological systems that form the top of LCV and will serve the entire rehabilitated factory complex; and an interior piazza, a seven-story-high public entrance hall for the new system of public spaces that the restoration of the complex will return to the city.The typological and scalar manipulation of the building is as substantial as our introduction of a new hybrid program. The compact shape of the new volume was stretched in length and height and inserted into the thin space between the historic buildings and the parking garages. LCV is clad in pre-oxidized copper, which in Venice distinguishes institutional buildings. The building’s surface thus instigates the action of time in architecture. We don’t know if or when oxidation will turn the building the green color of the vaults that punctuate the Venetian horizon, but it is yet another translation, suspending LCV between the historical and the contemporary.