2G Magazine's International Ideas Competition
for the Venice Lagoon Park

PRESS RELEASE
2G contest:Contest

To celebrate its 10 years, 2G magazine convenes an international ideas competition for the Venice Lagoon Park. The initial approach of the contest proposes a reflection on contemporary metropólis from the landscape project and the tension between global interests and local needs. The place chosen for the development of the program has been the Venice lagoon and the theme the creation of the Venice Lagoon Park.

The park project will seek to recover the urban idea of ​​the lagoon as a complex network of communications and settlements through the hypothetical re-colonization of its territory, the decentralization and atomization of a program of uses and the recovery of the lagoon as an urban constellation necessarily integrated into its natural environment. The program to devise this recovery will consist of an Urban Park and Lagunares Prototypes.

This contest is ideas, theoretical and does not imply development or execution of the project. The jury is composed of prominent architects: Iñaki Ábalos, Francesco Careri, James Corner, Anne Lacaton and Phillippe Rahm, together with Team 2G.

The period of consultation of the bases has passed, and these will be published on July 2, 2007.

The deadline for registration is October 15, 2007. Projects must be delivered no later than November 12, 2007, at 2:00 p.m. Barcelona time. The results will be published during January 2008.

Some Proposals for a Venice Lagoon Park

Saturday, February 02, 2008 | https://pruned.blogspot.com/

First is the winning entry from architects Thomas Raynaud and Cyrille Berger. Presented with the slogan Drip Feed, they propose to turn one of the islands in the lagoon into a sort of algae power farm using organisms that already live in the tidal marshes to convert water pollution into clean energy.

It'll be a site of production and leisure.

Or as described by the Paris team: “Our project for the urban park of Sacca San Mattia consists of reinvesting the island in a Venetian, multi-functional approach to urban planning, in the context of an enlarged metropolitan, tourist centre. The Drip Feed project on the Island of Sacca San Mattia puts into place an above-ground ulva rigida cultivation device that is in keeping with the Greenfuel system. A saprophyte structure that ingests polluted waste from local industry, and conceptually redefines the lagoon’s future water level, without harming the natural state of the island.”

(Combining clean energy production and public space. Drip Feed by Thomas Raynaud and Cyrille Berger.)

(Picnicing under an algae-filled trellis pavilion. Drip Feed by Thomas Raynaud and Cyrille Berger.)

Second is the entry from the Spanish team of Josep Tornabell Teixidor, Gerard Bertomeu, Miriam Cabanes and Enrique Soriano. Called Instant Gel, their proposal also makes use of existing water-borne organism and pollutants but this time they are to be used to set off a chemical reaction with layers of flexible gelly structures, creating fantastical island-sized foamy water lilies.

(Instant Gel by Josep Tornabell Teixidor et al.)

The cranes in the image above suggest perhaps that in the future climate-changed Venice St. Mark's will be transferred onto one of these floating islands.

Or perhaps Askin Ozcar's fake Venice will be realized here. Duplicate canals, duplicate churches, duplicate palazzos, duplicate Venetians and duplicate film festival and biennales, all floating above and tethered to the lagoon. And every couple of years (another biennale of sorts), it gets disconnected to become a mobile museum, mall and casino.

(Exploring the underwater gardens of Venice or perhaps of an other world. Instant Gel by Josep Tornabell Teixidor et al.)

2G Competition: Venice Lagoon Park 2nd Prize Winners

2G Competition - Venice Lagoon Park, Italy

competition 2nd prize, 2008

project title: [500m apart]

design team: Johanna Irander, Nicolo Riva, Nicole Carstensen, Samuel Austin, Nuno Gonçalves Fontarra

client: 2G Magazine

The design of the urban park on the island of Sacca San Mattia, situated in the Venetian lagoon, is divided into four areas; a square, a pavilion area, a salt water pond with red algae and a plantation of pine trees.

The lagoon is represented by a land art installation, whereinformation from lagoon prototype sensors is being displayed on a screen wall. Steel rods are distributed across the lagoon in a 500m square grid. A sensor is attached to each, which registers movement within a defined radius and transmits images and information to the base at the island of Sacca San Mattia.

Projected onto a 5m high screen wall, this data becomes an abstract representation of the lagoon, with which visitors may interact. Lagoon activity is visualised on the wall in a changing reality of pixels that map the movement of unseen waters. The currents, cycles, processes and activities interweave - the presence of the lagoon can be felt.

VENICE / lagoon park

Finalist project
2G Venice Lagoon park international competition
2007

Design: Luis Callejas, Edgar Mazo, Sebastian Mejia and Juan Pablo Martinez
Collaborators: Erica Martinez

As a canonical case of aquatic urbanization, the Venice Lagoon in Italy serves as an ideal ground for tactical interventions that trigger new forms of public life ultimately tied to aquatic events. Varying in scope and scale, the project strategically intervenes at the building scale of decaying houses threatened with collapse and from a tidal park at the vacant island of Sacca San Mattia to the territorial scale of an artificial reef to recover the lagoon’s ecology.

Removing the roofs but conserving the facades transforms residential buildings into open public spaces as they become abandoned or obsolete due to water damage. New gardens, galleries, small parks, and public baths appear behind their walls, eventually generating a decentralized system of dispersed yet connected micro-parks. Second, as a means of forecasting future landscape and climate events, the uninhabited island of Sacca San Mattia becomes a testing ground for the amplification and replication of the almost invisible, slow drowning of Venice. Through its simple features such as canals and trenches, the paths of the new park on the island register tidal cycles, to the extent of becoming inaccessible during high tide. Third, as territorial infrastructure, the artificial reef aims to protect and preserve weakened ecologies in the lagoon resulting from the constant traffic of the Vaporetto system of public ferries. Thus, the reef becomes both a highway for boats as well as a hotbed for the lagoon ecosystem, to eventually disappear from view under the rising tides of the lagoon

Finalist project 2G Venice Lagoon Park, international competition 2g Magazine Barcelona, Spain 2007 Proyect: Luis Callejas, Edgar Mazo, Sebastián Mejia, Juan Pablo Martinez

The park as a living museum of the slow death of the city.

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The Venice lake is colonized by an artificial reef system that intends to recover, keep and protect a living fertile ecosystem. With the change of the tides the reef emerges and disappears partially.

inside the canals the light and water level reveal the passing of the hours. Eventually the canals get flooded and become unwalkable.

The surface of the island is covert with as many seeds and spores as possible, the strongest and most capable species will impose and some months later there will be a completly unpredictable, wild and convulse garden.

The island coasts are the main circulation system, no paths and no program.

“I draw, not with ideas, not with stones; but with light and air the way of my transit.” Octavio Paz

Naos, Water clock house and confined forest. The residential and workshop constructions of the city of Venice, Murano and the other islands are colonized by contemplative uses as they are abandoned or become obsolete . Roofs are removed, walls stay, new gardens emerge, sitting rooms that will eventually get flooded. New decks, galleries, small parks and public thermae appear within the old walls in an unplanned way.

“there is nothing built on stone. Everything is built on sand, but it is our duty to edify as if the sand should be stone” Jorge Luis Borges

Inside the canals the light and water level reveal the passing of the hours. Eventually the canals get flooded and become unwalkable.