Dancing Club
Venice, Italy

The city of Venice is home of some of the world’s most important cultural events as Art Biennale, Architecture Biennale, and The Venice Film Festival. The cultural and social life of the lagoon is hectic and characterized by events, parties and exhibitions that are hosted in some of the beautiful palaces of this city. Looking back in time these palaces where not the only constructions that hosted amazing parties.

During the Renaissance young and rich Venetians were used to commission to architects some temporary constructions to host their parties. In paintings and engravings there are many examples of these constructions that were characterized by some common features: they were always made of wood, on the water, with a circular floor plan and often had a terrace on the top. Our project echoes these constructions rethinking them for a nowadays use conceiving history as an evolving idea not an excuse for a static craft or program logic.

This costruction looks like a monolith on the water. It has a dark appearance associated to a compact, stereometric and representative form with a contemporary and alternative language.

The structure of this upside down dome is made of wood ribs while the cladding is made of bakelised FSC wood. The exterior is painted black echoing venetians gondolas. The internal circulation takes place along a spiral that follows the circular perimeter.

The ambition behind this project is to convey the necessity to establish links between past and future, interior and exterior, landscape and enclosure, culture and memory. Our work focuses on the translation of such necessity into spatial and material forms of action.