Reading and building Venice, 1984: Cappai, mainardis, pastor's case popolari as material culture

Abstract

In the 1980s, Venice was a unique laboratory for studies on the relationship between contemporary architecture and the historical city, a matter which is critical today as well. Architecture projects of this period are precious testimonies to ways of reading the historical context and building within it. In February 1984, four architecture firms delivered the documentation required by the Venice Municipality's Extraordinary Housing Programme competition, concerning the construction of four housing projects in the Venetian territory. These were among the city's first new housing schemes directly operated by the Municipality after World War Two. Based on the analysis of archival documents, this study focuses on architects Cappai, Mainardis and Pastor's project, which proposed a reading of the city and their interpretation of housing as the expression of a 'material culture'. Beyond formal analogies, they chose to structure their project around the persistent material culture which underlay residential construction in both historical and contemporary Venice. Understanding the material culture of their time as inseparable from the building market, they adopted modern building industrialisation techniques. As the group was selected to build three schemes, their theoretical effort was eventually matched by an episode of actual prefabrication within the island's historical centre.