George Pop

The Garden of Acqua Alta

Architecture - MArch

Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA)

georgemichaelpop@gmail.com

Design Report

Academic Portfolio

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Submerging Venice

The atelier views La Serenissima as a landscape in constant transformation – submerged beneath its waters, it rises and reveals itself through the lens of a territory with all the experiential, environmental, cultural, and social associations of a fragile Venice. The atelier sought to investigate this territory through a new way of looking at the city – a cloud of Venetian artifacts gathered from across the Lagoon and tethered to the Querini Stampalia which, through its chimeric nature, acts like a micro-Venice of architectural uncertainty.

The cloud becomes a registering device of different scales from the extents of the Lagoon to the confines of the Cabinetti. A tool for collection, collation and studied manipulation through a purposeful blurring of dimension and duration with the intent of drawing out strange Venetian contingencies. Caught between the sea and the sky, the condition of the liquified city allowed for a reading of Venice as a maritime chart, an almost bathymetric study of its historical depths, where a hierarchical system of ‘flotsam’, ‘jetsam’, 'lagan' and 'derelict' informed architectural moves in relation to the existing fabric of the city.

A Liquifying Field of Influences

Island Territory

Section of the Venetian Caigo

Restoration Chamber // Axonometric

Registering Device

Project description

The Garden of the Acqua Alta is tethered to the Arsenale Vecchio between the Arsenale to the west and Castello to the east, between the scales of imperial industry and those of the lived city. Positioned within the highest flood risk within a city built on slender wooden poles, the project invites Venice to reflect on its own fragility. In service of the perpetual remaking and restoration of the city and its images, the architectural proposition is at once a Garden with Pavilions and a Workshop with Yards.

The architecture of The Garden derives from its watery origins in the Venetian Lagoon, from the lived realities of war and flood, spolia and detritus and the imagined realities of fiction, stories, and histories, urban fragments broken from the surfaces of bell towers and doorsteps, storybooks, and legends, caught in a graphic storm.

Built on hard edges, Venice loses the sense of the marshes on which it was built. The Garden aims to respond to Venice’s liquifying character by putting forward a series of heterotopias that occasionally seep westwards through the medieval wall of the Arsenale Vecchio and get caught in the urban fabric of Castello. The project echoes Venetian technological and environmental practices and proposes a social infiltration of the lived Venice at the West of the wall by means of producing, restoring, conserving, and presenting fragments of the city.