Curatela: Luca Molinari e Simona Finessi

CASA PLATFORM VENEZIA 2023

Scuola Grande della Misericordia di Venezia
from 20 May to 30 July 2023
Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am – 18 pm (last admission 5.45 pm)
Closing Days: every Monday, 26, 27 May, 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30 June, 18 July

 

MANIFESTO

We are living through a surprising and disorienting time. Metamorphosis is the closest image to indicate a phase of profound transformation that is challenging our lifestyles, the tools and languages with which we represent them, and the visions with which we imagine a different future.

The pandemic we are trying to leave behind has challenged many of the elements that seemed taken for granted. Fear of the other, of communities, of the city has solicited widespread, protected and illusory forms of loneliness, building distances between ourselves and others that now seem to be slowly recomposing themselves. The loosening of the virus has, in fact, brought us back to the squares and streets with the apparent feeling that nothing had happened. But the trauma we have collectively accumulated is working its way through and is yet to be interpreted, and we are certain that it will bring interesting consequences in our ways of inhabiting and designing places in the times to come.

But, in reality, the pandemic and structural crises we are observing are the most visible point of a much deeper and more widespread general systemic change that is intertwined with a different environmental sensitivity, with the need to return to building new shared narratives, to curb land and resource consumption, and to find collaborative forms that reduce waste and generate forms of social collaboration that seemed lost.

If the city of the 19th and 20th centuries is the binary place par excellence, that is, distinct in the separation of private and public, natural and artificial, male and female, work and leisure, and, at the same time, a metropolis that was built on the separation between functions located in rigid and exclusive urban zones with an idea of progress and unlimited consumption. The world of the 21st century is throwing completely different needs and challenges with the breaking of functional grids, a fluid relationship with time and community life, the dismantling of the traditional idea of privacy marked by digital sociality, the need to strongly contain energy dispersion and environmental crisis, the need to network and share needs, narratives and visions for the future.

 

The New Together is an exhibition and at the same time an active platform in which to begin to gather all those projects that are children of a new time, generous and capable of indicating the change we are experiencing and the solutions that can accompany this transition.

‘New’ because the projects seek to interpret an unprecedented time and desires in our lives by involving all the spaces in which communities (large and small) can find themselves.

‘Together’ because the need for sharing and dialogue are a natural, archaic condition of all living things and humans forcing the design world to offer solutions and visions for a different time.

We believe that all those projects capable of being lateral, queer, ambiguous in their functionality, transversal and generous are the visions that need to be studied, shared and told to focus a time of change.

The exhibition intends to collect all those projects built in the last three years in the world capable of guaranteeing opportunities for encounter, exchange, dialogue and sharing among all living people at every possible scale.

For this reason we will not pose functional and commodity distinctions, which we find outdated in the daily practice of our metropolises and cities, and because functional and temporal fluidity is the paradigm to be confronted with in the design of collective contemporary places.

 

We call hybrid projects, beyond single-function in which habits, uses, and times are fluid and constantly mixing:

  • housing with shared functions
  • hospitality with shared public functions
  • parks and public spaces
  • places for communities
  • cultural institutions
  • educational buildings open to community life
  • hospitals, clinics and nursing homes capable of dialoguing with the context
  • places for worship and spirituality

 

The Exhibition will bring together  140 international projects and will be open from May 20 until July 30 in the prestigious setting of the Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice.

All selected projects, will flow into the catalog that will be presented during the official opening of the Exhibition that will take place on May 19, 2023, in conjunction with the official opening of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale.

All authors of the selected projects will, in addition, be invited to give a lecture as part of the palimpsest developed during the Platform Architecture Festival that will take place at the Scuola Grande della Misericordia di Venezia from June 23-26, 2023.

 

 

Find out how to participate, click here