Scomenzar means to begin. In the lagoon it also names a way of building. When a community needed a new canal, it did not draw the finished channel and then dig it. It opened a small cut and let the tide scour the channel into existence. The canal that emerged was only partially predetermined, relying on a first gesture and the forces that gesture released.
Module 02 asks you to work this way. You will imagine the transformation of Torcello as a productive landscape, and you will do it by proposing not a single finished design but a sequence of three interventions that unfold through time. The first intervention starts a process. The next two modify that process as it develops. Design here is not a moment of determination. It is the beginning of something you will observe, adjust, and intervene in again.
Charlottesville, Tuesday, September 15 and Thursday, September 17
The first phase is a fast exercise. You will work in the same teams you formed for Module 01. Across two studio sessions you will produce initial ideas for the transformation of Torcello.
You will propose three interventions. The first starts a process. It can be a cut in the ground, a planting, a building, a structure, a portion of a structure, a policy, a sensing device, a change to ground or water. Anything that sets a spatial process in motion. The next two interventions modify that process through time. They respond to what the first gesture has produced and steer it. Together the three interventions describe not a final condition but an unfolding.
Each intervention evolves, and it must also function in every stage of that evolution. A proposition that only works in some future condition has not begun. It has only promised. What you propose is a sequence of working conditions, each one live and useful from the moment it starts.
You choose the interval across which the unfolding happens. It may be as short as a day or as long as twenty years. The interval is part of the proposal. A process that unfolds in a tidal day is different from one that unfolds across a generation, and the drawings, models, and arguments must represent that difference.
Torcello is the site, and it is to be developed as a working landscape. Viticulture is the anchor. The Dorona vine and the revival of the Venissa vineyard show what it means to cultivate in salt, tide, and periodic flood. Your interventions should build from that tradition of attention while reaching toward what Torcello could become.
The proposals should be speculative. They should test ideas that would break a conventional feasibility review. They should also be tempered by reality. Each intervention must be grounded in something real, a material behavior, a tidal rhythm, a cultivation practice, an economic or ecological constraint.
During the last hour of studio on Thursday, September 17 you will present. The format is drawings, models, and a slide deck. The drawings and models carry the primary spatial and material ideas. The deck carries the temporal argument, what each intervention starts and how the next modifies it. Temporality should also be explored in the models and drawings as it is central to the concepts.
Venice, September 20 through November 5
The fast exercise produces initial ideas. The residency is where those ideas become big. Fieldwork is not a check against a finished proposal. It is the material from which the big ideas emerge and the place where they sharpen.
In Venice you will carry your work into the field. Desk crits will be held at the Combo in Venice. You will test the three interventions against the site itself, against what you learn walking Torcello and its waters, against the fieldwork exercises, the introductions to site histories, the understanding of urban formation, and against the individuals you meet in residence. What you learned in Virginia was real but necessarily abstract. What you learn in Venice will be tied to place, and it will change the work.
In this phase you will develop a proposal that situates a productive viticultural landscape and its associated buildings. Your speculations should address the following.
Within each of these you have room to interpret and to speculate, but you will need to propose how each element is implemented and addressed.
The residency culminates in a three-day charrette during the final week in Italy at the Valmarana Center in Vicenza. Working in your teams, or in smaller teams if the work demands it, you will develop refined speculations that are more comprehensive than the fast exercise. These are still speculations, still propositions that start processes that are now sharpened by the site and its rhythms.
You will present these refined speculations with drawings and slides. Models are optional here.
The work does not end in Italy. Module 03 is where these big ideas become truly grounded in reality, tested against the hard constraints of building and cultivating, and refined toward the comprehensive proposals of the December final review. Module 02 ends where that work begins. It hands Module 03 a set of big ideas that are sharpened by the field.
Phase 01, Charlottesville. Drawings, models, and a slide deck presenting three interventions and the interval across which they unfold. Due at the end of studio on Thursday, September 17.
Phase 02, Venice. Refined speculations presented in drawings and slides, with models optional, developed in desk crits at the Combo and during the Valmarana charrette.