poliorceticon
15ª Biennale di Architettura (Padiglione Venezia)
The ideal city must be imagined, the real city must be re-conquered.
The reconquest must be understood as a permanent process implying heterogeneous and punctual transformational actions able to independently generate systematic reactions and relations amongst the elements of the contemporary city.
Poliorcetics is the branch of military art that studies methods, technics and means for besieging cities and fortresses. It is an art that, like Architecture, transforms places into tools, actions, strategies, and implies a strong knowledge of subjects that go beyond the Art of War and include engineering, geology, anthropology and politics.
The idea of conquest, is not just linked to control, supremacy, and suppression, but also to fusion among cultures, like in the case of Alessandro Magno and the fusion of his Hellenic Reign with Indian peoples.
With this theoretic background, the contemporary territory can be read as a juxtaposition of antithetical city models, and its form as the synthesis of different interpretive and modeling capacities typical of men and of their being-in-the-world (Heidegger).
The Veneto territory is characterized by the co-existence of profoundly different types of city models, and the areas that overlook the lagoon highlight this condition in an extreme way. Imagining future scenes in order to reconvert such a complex territory as Porto Marghera, means starting from a transformative process project, thought up not necessarily to be connected one with the other. On such theoretical bases, the project proposal interprets the theme of physical re-conquest of places and the possibility for the community to regain collective knowledge of the territory where it lives through the modification tools used in architecture.
The imaginary scene regards the near future and considers the present city the reality from where to start. Through different punctual interventions, the first step for the re-conquest of Porto Marghera will take place through new connections among existing elements, able to build a renewed accessibility, with the scope of creating porosity and functional connections. Some of these areas, once back in use, will be available for the spontaneous and temporary utilization of their inhabitants. The “conquest” process will be considered finished only when a series of new interventions will form with the existing a total functional urban mix, configuring itself as a “city without plan”, this is a city model built on fragments that derive from pieces put side by side for addition, from the repetition of independent elements, from “out-of- sync” buildings, combined with no logic, but that will be a fusion between productive and living culture.
