Venice Hospital: Concrete Materiality

As you walk, you trail your fingers over the concrete at your side: friable and gritty, the surface scratches your fingertips lightly, exciting in its uneven regularity. A seam passes, the protruding globule of a moment of concrete flow rendered eternal. Once past this frozen imperfection, the surface becomes smooth, almost soft as your hand moves over its extensive gloss.

When a material has been "subjected to any kind of treatment, its primitive type will be
modified...the type no longer rests at its primary stage of development, but has passed through a more or less distinct metamorphosis. When from this secondary or, according to the circumstances, variously graduated modification the motive now comes into a new material transformation...the form emerging from it will be a mixed result, one that expresses its primordial type...and all stages of modification that preceded the last formation." (Gottfried Semper. Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, p258)

In order for a project the scale of the Venice Hospital to move forward in a city as historic and phenomenally particular as Venice, consciously creating a legible connection between the haptic qualities of a space and its methods of formation is completely essential; disconnect between methods of creation and methods of habitation will doom the Hospital to obscurity once again. To that end, a series of studies into the materiality imbued by various sorts and configurations of formwork and finishing; these studies have been entrained into my process of design and detailing for several months.

form: bass- and balsa wood, longitudinal arrays

form: pine rods, arrayed normal to concrete surface

form:  fiberglass reinforcement mesh

Venice Hospital: Generative Formwork

Concrete formwork is the oft-invisible figural negative to the concrete objects we know and love. While some architects succeed in allowing this object of formation to remain legible in the final product, the formwork marks are more often plastered over, sealed, hidden as carefully as possible, erasing the process from the final object.

This series of details stemmed from the desire to turn site-cast concrete formwork from something which is ritually obfuscated after its primary function is complete into an organizational datum which facilitates multiple processes after the concrete has cured and the form been removed.