Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital

Venice: first city of engineered ground. Equal parts Iron age naval power and Renaissance cultural icon, it has for hundreds of years attracted artists, architects and engineers intent on changing the way humanity interacts with the world around us --- from the original builders who first reinforced the 115 islands of Venice then constructed completely new ground around them to the specialists now erecting the MOSE project to protect the city from rising tides and aquifer collapse.

Venice is also the site for one of the most (in)famous examples of unbuilt high modernity, in particular Le Corbusier's proposal for the Venice Hospital. This seminal project promulgated so close to Le Corb's death is perhaps the first and best described instance of the building typology we call "mats, fields, grounds, carpets, matrices, [which answer the] recurring calls for efficiency in land use, indeterminacy in size and shape, flexibility in building use, and mixture in program. It expresses architecture's increasing encroachment on both city and landscape and the open exchange between structure (building) and infrastructure (context)." (Sarkis, Hashim. Case: Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital. 13)

Elevation of Le Corbusier's Hospital behind the built fabric of Venice.

The Venice Hospital was pushed through three design iterations, ending with a finished schematic design and the beginnings of some of the construction documentation; the project was cancelled when the Dodge (city government body) experienced a major regime change and the new leadership scrapped the expansion plans of its predecessor in a show of value engineering-driven budget shrinking.

The defining details (clerestory light wells and piloti-lifted
platform) are visible in the built model.

For the next phase of my thesis work, I will delve into the exhumed body of the Venice Hospital, allowing architectural detail and close organizational ties between the architect and several essential allied realms to go viral, redefining the project at the smallest scale and allowing those changes to propagate upward. What will result is a new whole, a hospital less involved in instantiating the absolutes of modernist order and more involved with the technicalities of working in a surround as fragile and unique as the Venetian Lagoon.