Course Syllabus

Mark Rakatansky + Jorge Otero-Pailos_ Enacting Our Environmental Entanglements — Museum of Water.pdf

Enacting our Environmental Entanglements: 

Museum of Water / Museo dell'acqua

Fall 2023/A6305 JOINT HP/ARCH ADVANCED STUDIO III

Prof. Mark Rakatansky and Prof. Jorge Otero-Pailos

Mondays 1:30-6:30

Archival photograph of Piscina Gandini.

This studio will engage the climatic and cultural entanglements of Venice, designing a Museum of Water through the adaptiveredesign of the Gandini Pool Building (Piscina Gandini) on the Venetian island of San Giorgio Maggiore. The studio will travel to Venice during the first week of October.

Water has been both the allure and the anxiety of Venice since its formation. Settled first due to its protective nature as an islandand flourishing in later years through the trade afforded by its crucial geopolitical position, the very uncertain nature of the water that protects it endangers it. Intensive debates around the politics of water in the region have been ongoing from its beginnings,through the Renaissance, and continue today. Students will develop an experimental preservation plan for the building and its surrounding land and water-landings, designing a sequence of curatorial interventions and installations, inside and outside, to engage the cultural, ecological, religious, and political histories of water in Venice.

Under the weather at the Island’s open Green Theater.

Piscina Gandini today.

The Gandini Pool Building was designed in 1961 by Enea Perugini, architect of the Cini Foundation's Technical Ofice as part of a school on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. The building is characterized by a rather reined reinforcedconcrete structure-compared to what was previously experienced on the island-with crossed ribs, supported by inclined struts, which have a hinge in reinforced concrete, covered by a metal casing. These innovative features have led to speculations that the designer was working with, or was certainly influenced by, the famous engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, who was working in Venice at that time. The current architect in the Technical Ofice of the Foundation, and our guide in all these exchanges, Francesca Salatin, has written that "For the period, it was a pioneering building in terms of type, architectural ideas andtechnical installations." While no longer functional as a pool, the building has been used more recently to host exhibitions.

A recent exhibition at Piscina Gandini

The island of San Giorgio Maggiore                                                                                                         Piscina Gandini facing the rear docking area.

Climate change is posing serious challenges for the building. Students will design alterations that anticipate and manage sea level rise, increased winds, rain and hail storms which have become more sudden, unpredictable and violent in Venice. Know to locals as "water bombs" (bombe d'acqua), these extreme weather events are hazardous. Recent disasters, such as the wind storms that brought down the stage at the Parco San Giuliano in Venice, or that toppled 13 centenary trees around the Cini Foundation, have brought the challenges of climate change into sharp relief.

The Cini Foundation was established in 1951 to honor Giorgio Cini by his father Vitterio. In 1943 Vitterio Cini became Minister of Communication under Mussolini but resigned 6 months later and became involved in a plot against the dictator, and thus subsequently was sent to the concentration camp of Dachau. He was saved by his son who only a few years later died in an airplane accident. Since its inception in 1951 the foundation - situated in the San Giorgio Maggiore complex designed by Palladio - has been a leading proponent of the study of culture and society, as well as sponsoring new modes of art and performance. As part of a long-range collaboration between the Foundation and GSAPP to explore experimental design and experimental preservation techniques on climate adaptation and mitigation for existing buildings, last fall thestudio engaged ways of intervening and adding to the Green Theater (Teatro Verde) to reactivate it for contemporary programming.

The Green Theater.

Piazza San Marco.

In Venice, we will lodge at the Cini Foundation, seeing local significant works both historic and recent by Palladio, Sansovino, Scarpa, and OMA, as well as at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale-which this year includes crucial exhibitsfrom GSAPPers Emanuel Admassu, Andres Jaque, N H D M, Kate Orff, Mabel Wilson, and many other recent faculty and alumni. Working out of the Cini Foundation's dedicated studio spaces, we will have lectures from Italian experts on climate change such as Prof. Pier Paolo Campostrini (member of CORILA: Consortium for managing Scientific research related to the Venice Lagoon System), and site visits to paradigmatic Venetian examples of climate change adaptation technologies including those recently designed to protect the Basilica of St. Mark.

At the site we will gather photogrammetric scans to bring into animation platforms as a critical method of interactive design,under the guidance of noted animation filmmaker Anthony Koithra. If "performative design" has recently come to be understood only in the limited sense of quantifiable results, this studio proposes that the qualitive techniques of modes of artistic performance (design, film, music, theater) can enhance and innovate that understanding to consider how all of our constructions can enact their environmental entanglements.

Andrea Palladio, San Giorgio Maggiore.                           Carlo Scarpa, Fondazione Querini Stampalia.                         OMA, Fondaco dei Tedeschi.