Our first understanding of the lagoon will come from afar, through a structured design research project. Before we can intervene, we must know the ground we are modifying. Module 01 is the work of reading, translating, and projecting. It establishes the investigative foundation for the semester, and it does this before we set foot in the lagoon.
The lagoon is a constructed landscape. Every part of it, the diverted rivers, the dredged channels, the sea walls, the vineyards, the market gardens, the fish weirs, is an accumulated intervention, a decision made by someone and modified by everyone who followed. To read the territory is to see these traces, to understand what they made possible and what they foreclosed, and to grasp how they constrain and enable what can come next.
The investigation moves across four scales, each relating to the one above it and below it.
The watershed. From the Dolomites to the Veneto plain, where the freshwater begins, how it reaches the lagoon, and what it carries.
The lagoon. The five hundred and fifty square kilometers of enclosed territory, the brackish medium where land and water refuse to separate.
The archipelago. Torcello, Mazzorbo, and the surrounding islands, the settlements and productive grounds where the territory becomes inhabitable.
The site. A single vineyard, a settlement, an edge, a specific landscape feature, the place where every larger scale converges and becomes concrete.
Our research moves among these scales. It does not stay in one. The point is to see how a dynamic at one scale produces a condition at another, how the watershed shapes the lagoon, how the lagoon shapes the island, and how the island shapes the vine.
The studio organizes investigation across four lenses, and within each lens three areas of inquiry. Each team is assigned a lens and reads the territory through it. A lens is not a boundary. It is a focus, a way of entering a territory with a critical stance that shapes the work as we begin.
Viticulture. The cultivation of Dorona and other varietals, from rootstock and trellis through harvest and vinification, the vineyard as a territorial practice that shapes and is shaped by lagoon conditions. Horticulture extends this cultivation to the market gardens of the northern islands, the Sant'Erasmo artichoke and other specialty crops grown on saline soil with limited freshwater.
Aquaculture. The raising of fish, shellfish, and aquatic plants in managed water bodies, the valli da pesca and the moeche, and how managed fisheries interact with wild populations and generate habitat for other species.
Salt Production. The evaporation of seawater to produce salt, one of the lagoon's oldest industries, a sequence of basins at precisely calibrated elevations connected by channels and regulated by sluices. Extraction works the lagoon's material in other ways too, clay dug for brick and sediment dredged for channels, each reshaping the lagoon's morphology.
Hydrology and Sedimentation. The movement of water through the channel network and the sediment it carries, and how the distribution of sediment determines where islands grow, where channels shoal, and where the boundary between land and water shifts.
Climate and Salinity. The lagoon's gradient from fresh to salt, shaped by river inputs, tidal exchange, and evaporation, how salinity determines what can grow where, and how climate change shifts that gradient.
Biodiversity and Habitat. The biodiversity the lagoon supports, the migratory birds on the barene, the fish nurseries in the shallows, and how cultivation and conservation can be mutually reinforcing.
Infrastructure and Networks. The navigation channels, vaporetto routes, bridges, water supply, and waste management, the physical systems that structure territorial possibility.
Settlement and Urban Form. The distribution of human presence, from the density of Venice through the dispersed settlements of the northern lagoon to the near-abandonment of Torcello. Tourism shapes this distribution too, the movement of visitors and capital as a territorial force that reshapes land use and labor.
Governance and Policy. The institutional frameworks that regulate land use, water management, fishing rights, and environmental protection, and how overlapping jurisdictions shape what is possible.
Representation. How the lagoon is mapped and visualized, the cartographic conventions, modeling platforms, and data protocols that embed assumptions about what matters. The archive is part of this, the maps, records, and photographs that preserve past conditions and make reconstruction possible.
Sensing and Monitoring. The technologies and practices that register environmental conditions, from nineteenth century tide gauges to satellite remote sensing and in-situ sensor networks. Alongside these instruments stands traditional ecological knowledge, the accumulated wisdom of fishermen and farmers, an oral and embodied practice that registers what the gauges miss.
Temporal Frameworks. The ways time is conceptualized in relation to the lagoon, tidal calendars, agricultural seasons, generational cycles, and climate projections, and how proposals engage multiple temporal horizons.
We will develop three instruments for reading the territory. Each has its own peculiarities and set of questions it can pose, and together they form the grounds of inquiry for the semester.
The dossier is a multi-scalar atlas. It examines the territory through our assigned lens and gathers the evidence into a document. It moves across the four scales, from watershed to site, and it traces the relationships between territorial dynamics and urban form, between the lagoon's environmental systems and Venice's architecture, public spaces, and patterns of settlement.
The dossier is an atlas, not an encyclopedia. It does not claim comprehensive description. It selects, it foregrounds, it argues. The maps, drawings, histories, diagrams, and writings we create and assemble should make a claim about what matters and why. Each team designs a research dossier as tabloid (11x17) sheets or spreads. This is not a collection of things we find. It is a narrative about what we believe is important when the lens is focused.
The guidebook is a designed artifact for use in the field. It is not a report. It is an instrument for observing, a book we will carry into the lagoon and use to read what we find there. The format and how it is used are at the core of what we are designing. It needs to be reproducible (18 copies) as the guidebooks are exchanged between teams and given to the faculty. Our guidebook will teach another team to see through our lens, and theirs will teach us to see through theirs. It should be precise enough to direct attention and open enough to allow for interpretation by other users.
The model projects a propositional statement. It expresses stakes and values. It frames our engagement with the territory by showing what demands response and why, across the domains of landscape, architecture, and urban form.
The model should be spatial and adhere to a scale, even if the scale is relational. It is an argument made in three dimensions, a first position that the rest of the semester will test. What is represented and what is left out are critical considerations. It marks where we stand, and it should test the ideas that come forward in the research dossier.
We will work in assigned teams. Each team is assigned one of the four lenses, reads the territory through that lens across all four scales, and builds the three instruments from what it finds.
The lenses are not exclusive. They overlap, and a team may draw on neighboring lenses as the work requires. But each team has one lens as its primary focus, and the dossier, model, and guidebook all trace back to it.
A research dossier, a tabloid (11x17) atlas of the territory through our lens.
A guidebook, a designed artifact for the field, exchanged between teams.
A site model, a propositional statement of stakes and values.
The module concludes with a review in Charlottesville, where the dossiers, models, and guidebooks are presented together as the grounds of inquiry for the semester.