Venice Museum Bridge
Proposal for Ponte Dell'Accademia, Venice
Competition Entry, 2006
The Venice Museum-Bridge channels the late John Ruskin, the 19th Century English architectural
critic whose visitations upon the city found an interpretation of the past suitable for the polemical
needs of his day. Ruskin's emotional commitment to the gothic distinguished him from the rationalist
vein of his fellow revivalists, causing him to view the triumph of the gothic style in organic / representational rather
than mechanical / structural terms. What's so bad about feelings after all? Once shorn of its moralizing formal prescriptions, Ruskin's language
could be revived to describe a unitary architectural conception- a fusing of evocation and structure,
dynamism and balance, variation and time, a mechanics and an organics conceived not in opposition but together.
By being both a building and a bridge the project complicates any linear approach toward its conception- either
element can be adapted into the other, but the pleasure lies in a deeper mixture of the two. Thus the project
emerges as a structural problem which must be posed in such a way as to be capable of generating continuous and
categorical variations from which all architectural elements could emanate out of.
A class of geometrical objects called minimal surfaces is employed for this purpose. These surfaces are
characterized by being locally saddle-shaped, i.e. being equally curved in opposite directions. Like soap-films,
these surfaces are strong and lightweight by virtue of their specific shape and boundary condition.
These objects are realized on the site as metal lattice structures or grid-shells, sprouting up at each embankment
and supporting the floors and eventually the roof. The modulation of size, shape and interconnectivity of the
grid-shell members accomplishes the transition from the in-plane forces inherent in membranes to those of the roof
structure behaving globally as a single member as it spans the canal. In this way the architecture becomes an
expression of the load transmission of the structure. The museum mass, a large amount of space to be part of a
bridge, is suspended from the roof, opening up view corridors along the embankments and endowing the building with
the appearance of floating.
| Foliation Studies from LISP Routines | |
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helix-catenoid transform: x(u,v) = cos theta sinh v sin u + sin theta cosh v cos u y(u,v) = -cos theta sinh v cos u + sin theta cosh v sin u z(u,v) = u cos theta + v sin theta theta = pi/3 |
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| catenoid (theta = pi/2) foliates out of catenoid-helix (theta = pi/3) | |
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Elevation view from Grande Canal |
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View from south embankment |
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View from north embankment |
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Site with Roof Plan |