Venice, Italy
2012

After being awarded with the first place in the previous year with the L'Isola Nascosta project, I felt free to propose an unusual work: regenerate Venice through water, that is, through the redesign of an iconic building which was part of the recent history of the city: the Teatro del Mondo by Aldo Rossi. Our objectives were, initially, to pay tribute to my generation that was profoundly marked not only by this building but also by the Bienalle di Venezia of 1980, called The Presence of the Past, to which this project had originally been conceived. But also to respond somehow to the question posed thirty two years earlier from Paolo Portoghesi and Maurizio Navarro to Aldo Rossi: create a floating theatre to Venice, constant element of it history since the Viking's era. Our final result were the twelve floating theatres conceived with having only one ground rule: a base plant of 10m x 10m. Those theatres, when on water, would compose a "procession" and when back to land would be installed in a parking, filling altogether a deck of sixteen squares made of modules of 10m x 10m each. The theatres would occupy twelve modules and the four remaining ones would be used to store infrastructure. Each day the theatres could be placed in a different module, giving the architecture a special dynamic when in land: a square of theatres which had a different configuration every day. 

The work was selected to represent the IUAV at the Biennalle di Venezia of 2012.

Author: Francisco Spadoni
Assistants: Nicola Bedin, Andrea Castellani, Chiara Cavalieri, Giacomo Favilli, Alvise Pagnacco