Fourteenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

The hypothesis of a ‘timeless’ architecture, constructed simultaneously in myth and history, is the theme of study and research. It is a design theme (and a difficult one). This passage, written by Gianugo Polesello for the research project “Centuriazioni, Città e porti dell’Alto Adriatico” (2002), introduces some theoretical and operational issues related to the complex system of relationships between architecture and history in the theoretical and design research developed by Gianugo Polesello in thirty years of the “Laboratorio Venezia” educational and research activities on the metropolitan lagoon city of Venice. Attempting to relate the opening passage to the idea of historicity described by Walter Benjamin in his “Theses”, which question the historicist temporal ‘continuum’, the design operation seems to aim at “suspending” the diachronic dimension of historical time in order to assume history as ‘building material’ and, through inventions that repeat the “already-done”, continuously historicize its meaning “in a sort of co-presence, in a history without a succession of time”. This contribution critically retraces some of Gianugo Polesello’s most significant “Venetian projects” for the metropolitan lagoon city of Venice. Its purpose is to elucidate the logical pathways and theoretical and operational underpinnings of a design methodology that abstracts elements “already-given” from their historical context and recontextualizes them with renewed significance. This approach broadens the relationship between architecture and history beyond the limitations and measure of time, embracing, as Polesello asserts, a broader perspective that transcends temporal confines and conventional categorizations of temporality.