“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.
