Venice Hospital: Synthetic Ground

For a project investigating Venice, the original city of synthetic land, the complex ground condition merits a uniquely detailed solution. If this detail is to be reducible to the design team which created it, as the overarching claim of this thesis posits, the design must be facilitated by a productive cooperation between architect (yours truly) and a professional who understands the complexity of grounding --- in this case, a geotechnical engineer. With the help of reports from the Universities of Padova and Bologna, USC, and the American Society of Civil Engineers with a soils specialist to unpack them, I've created a design for grounding the reinvigorated Venice Hospital.

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)