venecia ciudad futura
Atlas of Architectural Projects for the City of Venice
Speculative Architecture
UPSAM - Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Madrid, Spain
February 2013
Venecia Ciudad Futura is a self published book that compiles a series of architectural investigations and speculative projects developed around the city of Venice. Conceived as an atlas, the publication combines studio work, urban research, visual material, and project proposals produced over the course of a year.
Rather than presenting Venice as a fixed image, the book approaches it as a site of projection, conflict, memory, and transformation.
+info and book
Background
The book emerged from an architectural design studio and was shaped by a broader investigation into Venice, including a study trip to the city and visits to the Venice Architecture Biennale.
The publication also positions itself as more than a conventional printed book, connecting the physical volume with digital files, images, and additional documentation.
The book opens with a reflective section that documents the research context behind the project. It recounts the preparatory work, the relationship between the studio and Venice, and the travel experience that informed the year’s proposals. This section frames the publication as both an archive of process and a record of architectural observation
Tragicomedia en Venecia
This project turns Venice into a theatrical device. Conceived as a stage set populated by characters drawn from literary references, it allows different scenes, situations, and urban backdrops to be combined and performed. The work proposes a way of reading the city through narrative conflict, desire, and role playing, transforming Venice into an active setting rather than a passive backdrop.
Within this project, several alternative scenarios for Venice are staged, including a commercial Venice, a submerged Venice, a carnivalesque Venice, and a more explicitly utopian floating Venice. Each backdrop proposes a different atmosphere and political condition for the city.
Entramados de intereses en Venecia
This section studies Venice through overlapping patterns of use and desire. Different character types are defined, each with distinct interests and priorities, and the city is remapped according to those preferences.
Through this method, Venice appears not as a neutral urban form but as a network structured by selective attractions, concentrations, and exclusions.
The project develops separate readings of the city for figures such as the young and active visitor, the recently married couple, the cultured composer, and the businessman.
When these networks are superimposed, they produce a new diagram of the city, revealing dense zones of interest and suggesting a virtual border shaped by use rather than by the historical outline of the islands.
Embarcadero: Archipiélago artificial
This proposal imagines a floating system for the Venetian lagoon inspired by the structure of water plants and lily pads. It develops the idea of an artificial archipelago made of modular pieces capable of creating different spatial compositions depending on changing needs. The project reframes the lagoon as a field for light, floating, adaptable occupation.
The proposal connects natural reference, structural thinking, and inhabitable infrastructure. Plant morphology becomes a model for flotation, stability, and modular connection, while the project itself suggests a softer and more expandable urban edge for Venice.
Ampliación del cementerio de San Michele
The book also includes a proposal for the expansion of the cemetery of San Michele. The title indicates an architectural intervention tied to the logic of extension, edge condition, and burial landscape within the Venetian context. As with the previous project, I can confirm the section title and its position in the publication, but not enough descriptive detail is visible in the material I checked to summarize it more specifically with confidence.
Monumento al artista fallecido: El silo de las flores
This project appears in the book index as one of the main proposals. From the title alone, it reads as a funerary or commemorative intervention, likely positioned between monumentality and symbolic landscape. I can confirm the title and its presence as a dedicated section in the publication, though the excerpt I checked does not include enough visible text to describe it more precisely without guessing
Capilla en el cementerio de San Michele
This section is dedicated to a chapel project in the cemetery of San Michele. Its placement within the book suggests a continuation of the investigation into Venice through funerary space, memory, and architecture. I can confirm it as one of the book’s project sections from the index, though I do not want to invent details that are not visible in the excerpt reviewed.
Across its different sections, Venecia Ciudad Futura moves between narrative speculation, urban analysis, typological invention, and infrastructural imagination. Some projects construct fictional scenarios, others remap the city through social interests, and others propose new architectural systems for the lagoon and cemetery landscape. Together, they present Venice as a city that can be read and reimagined through multiple overlapping futures.