Re-collecting
Water Histories
Fall 2023
GSAPP Adv V Design Studio
Instructors: Mark Rakatansky, Jorge Otero-Pailos
The adaptive reuse project encapsulates Venice's unique water collection history, specifically its wellheads—an ingenious system vital in a land surrounded by saltwater. The project reimagines the societal and communal significance of this historical infrastructure, and evokes contemporary water conservation efforts of the future. Transforming and extending the existing site of a former naval training swimming pool ‘Piscina Gandini’ from the 1960s, the proposal is a sequential journey carved by two planes: roof and ground as water collection, skylights and filtration surfaces, blurring the boundaries between a path and a building. Reinvented pitched roofs collect rainwater while reclaimed terracotta tiles aid in natural cooling and energy storage. The immersive journey through water's historical significance exhibits the evolution from early water collection systems, the social fabric and communal order they wove, and climaxes at the intersection of waterspines, where the transformed piscina building becomes a contemporary exhibit of collecting, consuming and experimenting with water processes. The museum experience thus transcends typical enclosure boundaries, offering diverse encounters with water.
By both honoring and projecting forward from Venice's water history, the project aims to deepen public awareness about water processes, advocating for their conservation as crucial resources for a sustainable future.
The architecture is an infrastructure exhibiting the processes and harvesting of water, and this process becomes the armatures reaching in, framing, and holding its exhibit objects.
Exhibition Sequence
First, water was acquired purely through the transport of waterboats from the mainland, bringing river water through waterwheels loading buckets and transporting back to venice. The wooden boats also enabled the transport of bricks, as the building block of venice’s pavement and construction of wells.
As wellheads flourished, it created a whole society and politics functioning around its system. Every citizen had duties in maintaining the operation of the public wellhead, while private wellheads were afforded by the aristocrats. As the spine reaches the pool building, the exhibit transitions to the erosion and decline of the wellhead system, and the advent of the aqueduct dredging.
In this scene, the roof gutters become the framing of the portraits, showing different societal roles, and diverting water down into the gravel courtyard. Central to the drawing of water are women known as the bigolante who delivers water to each households.
At the turn of the public scene, the wellheads developed from the primitive brick to elaborately adorned artifacts, as those who can afford their private wellheads often celebrated their affluence with water vessels and sculptures in social tea parties as the most essential resource to venice.
In this scene, the roof gutters become the framing of the portraits, showing different societal roles, and diverting water down into the gravel courtyard. Central to the drawing of water are women known as the bigolante who delivers water to each households.
At the turn of the public scene, the wellheads developed from the primitive brick to elaborately adorned artifacts, as those who can afford their private wellheads often celebrated their affluence with water vessels and sculptures in social tea parties as the most essential resource to venice.
Entering the piscina building, the architecture becomes a contemporary exhibit of collecting and experimenting with water.
The horizontal spine becomes a congregational water playspace extending and reaching from the exterior landscape, with organic steps down into the water storage tank with fluctuating water levels.
The banks of the building host educational laboratories and workshops where water samples from this building and throughout larger parts of venice are collected and studied, and children will be able to create their own hands-on experiments in a classroom setting.
When it rains, water is collected through the reinvented pitched roof down the thermal walls, lined with terracotta tiles reclaimed from the existing roof and inverted as interior rainscreens, draining into the tank of the pool. Water can then be circulated within the wall supplying the reuse in laboratories.
The space is made dynamic where water can be experienced in a myriad of ways. From drinking, sharing, playing, exploring, learning, to performing and projecting, and experimenting with fresh/marsh filtration plantings from the labs that turn the space into temporary phenomena.
When it rains, water is collected through the reinvented pitched roof down the thermal walls, lined with terracotta tiles reclaimed from the existing roof and inverted as interior rainscreens, draining into the tank of the pool. Water can then be circulated within the wall supplying the reuse in laboratories.
The space is made dynamic where water can be experienced in a myriad of ways. From drinking, sharing, playing, exploring, learning, to performing and projecting, and experimenting with fresh/marsh filtration plantings from the labs that turn the space into temporary phenomena.
