“Novissime is a theory of Venice and not a project; Novissime is
a metaphor of the Benedetto Bordone’s image of the city”. With
theese premises Gianugo Polesello returned, some years ago, to
the “paradox of Novissime”: to the idea of a “permanent , obsessive
invention of Venice which meant “to push the future into the past,
to reinvent the function of time and to negate history”. The other
premise links the constellation of Bordone, the ring of the minor
islands with Venice inside the shape of the lagoon, with the procedural
role of a schemata, more than a representation, a map as a
“permanent artifact”. Having forgotten this Venice, omitted (?) the
subtle and extensive dimension of continuity between the inside
and the outside, never sure of what is understandable as landscape
and what stays for the solid, built architecture of the city, where “the
outside is, fundamentally negated ,being only a boundary-land to
cross, a site to fulfil without value or meaning”, defines the betrayal of
the theory, the treason of the projects-theories, which as a homage to a Venezia
Quadrata ( apart Novissime, the hospital of Le Corbusier, John
Heiduk’s Cemetery of the Ashes of Thought or Rossi’s Teatro del
Mondo and others more) in different poetics drew the quadrature
between the city/architecture and the city/landscape.
The design goals and objectives of any “venitian” project could be
resumed in the title “dopo Novissime”: the space between San
Giobbe and San Secondo understood as a “quadratura”, framing, of
this area on the ground of the entire urban system and its possibles
scenarios, never forgetting its fundamental ambiguity, central and
peripherical at the same time, and its “normality”; to think Venezia as
a normal city and ask which characters could generate, today, a new
process of housing development, how to inhabit the secret gardens
and courtyards between water and land, invention and time.
