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Architects: GruppoFonArchitetti
- Area: 4919 m²
- Year: 2010
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Photographs:Daniele Domenicali
Venice is an organic city, where the sea water goes in for six hours and goes out for six hours from the lagoon, which surrounds the city.. The saltwater is mixed with fresh water of the lagoon, creating a unique ecosystem, where, perhaps, against nature, man has built.
In these green water, due to the life of the seabeds, everything is reflected, starting from the sky which provides colour variations throughout the day, seasons and weather conditions. Colours in motion never graspable.
In these waters, besides the sky, Byzantium and Palladio's architecture are reflected, but also the less known architecture of the twentieth century.
The "Centrale Mazzoni", former Central Station of Venice Santa Lucia railway station, designed in the thirties by the "futuristic" engineer and architect Angiolo Mazzoni, is one of these twentieth century buildings; it has a valuable formal and symbolic value in the heart of the ancient city.
It arrived as a big empty abandoned box nowadays. The facades, carefully preserved by the restoration project, as evidence of the Venetian industrial revolution, hide the heart of the organic redevelopment project.
The "rationalistic essence" hid a secret: each geometrical relationship was linked by golden ratio; a shell appeared connecting the dots. The organic Venice unveiled by rationality.
This inheritance from history suggested to organize the distribution spaces as a series of sensory and chromatic perceptions, never the same, where natural light comes in and changes colour during the day and seasons. Each window has a different colour, as well as the parapets, through a combination which does not give references, keeping mind out of rationality, which improperly lives in the space of feelings.
The glasses stains the light, both natural and artificial, during the night, but they are also a mirror reflecting the surrounding context and they have the ability to mirror themselves on water, in the heart of the building, where often reigns a surreal silence, difficult to find in the tourist town by now.
Colour, glass, stones, bricks, wood, light, organic shapes make a single and whole system of reference for the project. This material is always present in the city, every corner is colour. Glass is a founding part of the industrial heritage of this city.
In the project, the use of the colour is related to the red brick and white Istrian stone, the materials of the city. More light in the sky than on earth: the project has brought the light into the building, where darkness reigned before.
