VENICE CITYVISION PRIZE

VENICE CITYIVISION competition: Nature and purpose of the competition
If the future is gone, what past is expecting us?
Try to imagine New York in its future if the manipulation of the urban context and its architectural objects, joined with its inhabitants, will be influenced by SPACE and TIME.

FIRST PRIZE  - A. Bottero, S. Della Rocca, V. Bruni – G8U3F7

Venice is stolen from the lagoon. A constant struggle of men stealing fragments of ground from the water. Venetian buildings were built by establishing a precise relationship with the water: they faced the canals showing their splendor and wealth.

Not merely places of transit, a substantial part of daily life was carried out on the canals and here social interactions and commercial transactions took place. The perception of the reality from water is accelerated and distorted. The meaning of travel on the water is reduced to the fastest way to move from one point to another of the city. Water as a space of transit, a neutral dimension in which to simply migrate from one place to another. In our cities we are accustomed to distinguishing spaces of transit from spaces of standing.

But can a space of transit mutate into a space of standing? How can architecture manage to overturn a relation taken for granted?

The concept develops around this thought and from the intention to build new scenarios of dwelling in the city, discovering a third level, that in balance between the water and the seabed. Rooms open towards the sky that float and move on the water. Rooms from which you can observe Venice from below, as if from a cradle, safe from the din coming from the canal banks.

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SECOND PRIZE - O. Di Manno / L. Catena / F. Cusani / F. Graviglia 

The city appears now still in its past, crystallized in modern postcards like yesterday in Canaletto’s canvasses: not anymore suited, then, to the needs of contemporary life. What Venice misses is efficient services, modern infrastructures and a true labour market; or maybe, the same elements rendered in a version sustainable by the same city lightness. Too quickly, all of this has been sacrificed in favour of the progressive “museumalization” of Venice, without evaluating the risk of the exile of those same persons that made the city’s grandeur: the venetians.

Our vision wants then to be an innocent provocation, an unusual way to re-assign the places to their inhabitants, selecting some celebrated and “sacred” examples and transforming them into contemporary works.

The use of a cover skin, if on one side maintains the fundamental historical-artistic features, on the other conveys a different evocation of a contemporary city, by placing the building in a diverse aesthetic and functional reality.

The only remembering will be tied to the sheer volume, symbol of a new autonomy of the building and also capable of making this new objects (such they have become) different from the their hidden underlying.

info: www.cityvision.com

ROME CITYVISION PRIZE

ROME CITYIVISION competition: Nature and purpose of the competition
If the future is gone, what past is expecting us?
Try to imagine New York in its future if the manipulation of the urban context and its architectural objects, joined with its inhabitants, will be influenced by SPACE and TIME.

FIRST PRIZE - M. Marian / A. cassi – 00583

A cloud of aerostatic balloons is hanging over the city, airships borrowed from a time when dreaming and running after the future were compulsory. Almost a Fellinian dream, a sonnet by a famous composer played on a loose chord. Each balloon has taken off from a dock corresponding to a specific suburb, defining an imaginary circle that takes up the diameter of the Raccordo Anulare, the ring road of Rome, and embraces the city.

The concept consists in creating a sort of fluctuating ring road. A new level that is added to the existing layers of the city. An immaterial level, defined only by the straight and circular trajectories of the balloons that move from one dock to the next, connecting the various Roman outskirts with each other. A system that is placed on the margins of the city that allows to seize the urban environment through new means. Knowledge, combined with the volatileness of a dreamt world, like a circus tent, like the famous travelers’ note books, these are the foundations of our views.

It’s the ideal place to see if the world will end or not.

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SECOND PRIZE - J. Cheon / N. Soe / M. Conway / F. Colin – 00167

‘Rome City Vision’ offers the opportunity to re-conceptualize the relationship between landscape, urban design, and architecture in the context of a historically complex and dynamic city environment. Our proposal creates an integrated urban vision whereby programs, spaces, and typologies are interwoven as a way of producing provocative urban vision.

Unlike works of architecture, the city serves as an icon through patterns from the urban fabric’s form and its public features. Though a city’s plan is seldom visible to the eye from the street, it is still the means an individual’s uses to understand the city as place (through its maps, subway and bus route plans, as well as green space). Thus the plan serves as an important icon for inhabitants of the environment. Creating an urban fabric that is able to conform to deformations of the land, topography, and spatial restrictions. The pattern is stretched and squeezed parametrically, to produce urban spaces, plazas, lawns, urban corridors and streets from the same logical system.

The green space extends nature from the lower hills into the center of the city, becoming part of a green network; serving as an important symbolic central space for Rome (reminiscent of New York City’s ‘Central park’). The landscape serves to create a connection between the place and its geography.  

read more: cityvision

NEW YORK CITYIVISION PRIZE

NEW YORK CITYIVISION competition: Nature and purpose of the competition
If the future is gone, what past is expecting us?
Try to imagine New York in its future if the manipulation of the urban context and its architectural objects, joined with its inhabitants, will be influenced by SPACE and TIME.

FIRST PRIZE - E. Giannakopoulou – S. Carera – H. Isola – M. Norzi

We have interpreted the competition as an homage to Romanian-born American artist, architect, cartoonist and illustrator, Saul Steinberg (1914–1999). Among many masterpieces, he is the author of famous The New Yorker magazine cover (March 29, 1976) “View of the World from 9th Avenue”. Such drawing has come to represent Manhattan’s telescoped interpretation of the country beyond the Hudson River. Showing the supposedly limited mental geography of Manhattanites, it has become iconic as a representation of one of the most influential and perhaps the last ideal city ever existed.

The steps that lead to this new condition are:

• Manhattan becomes overwhelming and the population moves out, densifying the other Borroughs.

• NYC takes responsibility to become energetically independent exploiting the waste as an energetic resource through the most advance recycling technologies of the future.

• The idea of a massive center of exploitation of the waste gets adopted. A radical topographic transformation of the island lays the foundation for a new landscape of smooth hills that embody the buildings as well as the disposal and transformation process of the waste: the most precious resource of year 2076.

• The skyscrapers, vertical development symbols of the previous century, get abandoned, then readapted to host vertical distribution, stockpiling and conduits of the recycled materials.

• Only the main architectonical feature of the buildings, the top, emerges from the new ground level becoming a monument, as evidence of the previous state of the civilization. Bridges and tunnels of access to the island host the pipelines and the transportation of the materials.

• Central Park is preserved unchanged as a relic, ideal symbol of the principle that inspired such transformation.

• In year 2076 NYC Beautiful Dump is working at full capacity and becomes the largest work of land art ever existed as well as the first city energetically self sufficient and with no impact on the outer environment.

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SECOND PRIZE - E. Pieraccioli e C. Granato

If it’s true that the destructive effects never cease to act, and that they are repeated in the history of every cycle, it is true that what is civilization at a given time, will be the primitive state in the next moment. Creation and Destruction, the scene endlessly. The feverish speculative activity in human years, within the “grid”, has led to a heaviness of the Earth. The temperature increases slowly. Regardless of the most mortifying surprises, the earth continues its transformation toward equilibrium.