Boris Podrecca with Marco Zordan injects a new lease of life into the Ca’ Pesaro, reviewed by Rita Capezzuto. Photography by Paola De Pietri.

There is no city in the world in which it is harder to build than Venice. It has been a graveyard of the hopes of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. And yet there are signs of a change in the climate. David Chipperfield is working on an extension to the cemetry island of San Michele. The new architecture school designed by Miralles and Tagliabue is underway. And Frank Gehry is designing a new Venice Gateway at the airport.

But even so, it is still a daunting place for an architect to be commissioned to restore and to reorganise an ancient museum building, such is the restrictive power of the complex legislation in force to protect them, and perhaps smother them with kindness. Yet the capacity of the architect to find room in programmes of this type to manoeuvre and to strike a sensitive balance between the client’s specifications and his or her own visions is decisive to the ultimate success of failure of the project.

Ca’ Pesaro, which houses the Galleria internazionale di arte moderna is a case in point. Boris Podrecca was appointed to carry out a much needed renovation in 1991. Podrecca had a very tight brief, but was also determined to achieve something that would also be of urban significance. Over the years in has taken to see the project through Podrecca has not swerved from his initial idea, undaunted neither by the tricky conditions of a dense Venetian fabric, or still less by the bureaucratic fetters of a heritage department particularly unbending in its attitude to the safeguarding of a hyper-protected monumental city.

The baroque palazzo (1659-1710), designed by Baldassarre Longhena and facing the Grand Canal, has been overhauled both in its functional aspects, and its artistic strategy. At the same time, the whole of the ground floor – its closed and open spaces – has been treated as a continuation of Venice’s public spaces. An enclave that includes a large hall, the entry court, a transverse wing and finally a small gothic courtyard, is now accessible to all, with no obligation to visit the gallery on the upper floor.

In this way Ca’ Pesaro has been grafted into the city. Podrecca, working with Marco Zordan, has succeeded with passionate stubbornness in partially de-museumifying one of the city’s most prestigious civic institutions, by subverting the status quo of historic exhibition icons which only the various Biennales can briefly stir.

Curiously, the most successful point in the programme to open up the Ca’ Pesaro parterre to the city is the tiny, untidy gothic courtyard. Previously separated from the rest of the complex, it has been annexed to it only as a result of this new project, faced by uneven volumes, a few ancient remains, and unheroic traces of ordinary everyday life.

Into this gap have been introduced two free standing elements, in no way related either to each other or even to their immediate context: a voluminous metal fire escape, resting externally on the museum wall and clearly visible as a dark prosthesis from some angles of the surrounding alleys; and a small black cube, bathed by a light jet of water gushing from its hollow interior. The water flows along the concrete and, with a soft sound, collects on the ground in pale grooves set like a Catherine wheel around the dark block to contrast its static state with the impression of a rotating motion.

Starting from the seclusion of this almost profane courtyard, set back from the main entrance, is a perspective stretching right over to the Grand Canal at the opposite end. The brick and marble paving spreads a sort of unifying red carpet over this spatial sequence. Its scale and decor increase and are also made fluid by the large glazed walls that lead into the entry hall without interrupting the overall visual continuity. The transparency of this access allows the long end-to-end atrium to retain all the solemnity of an old Venetian palazzo. But it also assumes the familiarity of a public space from which people can comfortably reach the cafeteria, the bookshop or a temporary exhibitions room.

The large restored wood beams in the ceiling hide the systems, leaving only spot and diffused artificial lighting to indicate the exact spatial areas, directed upwards at the tall busts in regular succession, or downwards to light up a passageway. With his well-known stylistic flexibility (“I hate the racism of styles and I don’t think architecture can be expressed through any one idiom alone”), Podrecca carries out minor surgical operations on the building’s body, reacting to each individual situation without the least desire to make old and new look the same. Indeed he insists on the differences between densities of materials, between the meanings of compositional features or between the aesthetics of past and present.

He likes to talk about “organs transplanted”, celibate objects which the museum’s framework metabolizes. In the backbone between two brick walls he has inserted a startling crossed glass staircase, held up by a slender but solid metal frame. This subjects the ambiguity of glass to the rules of a precise geometric design.

On the piano nobile, that of the museum proper, the architects’ attention is concentrated on the exhibition system, seen as a further metaphor for a system of thought. The wall is no longer simply a surface to hang works of art from, but becomes instead an ingenious machine adapting to the varying needs of a museum. The new wall, built over the existing ones, is “at once an outer wrapping and a nucleus”. About 10 centimetres deep, it incorporates ducts and devices that allow an upward movement to sustain particularly large works. With this strategy, the architects have managed to infiltrate the pattern of circumscribed conservation, in a refreshing variety of effective ways.

In addition, the general restructuring plan for Ca’ Pesaro includes other important phases of renovation, such as the conversion of the second floor (at present still occupied by the Museum of Oriental Art) into a Kunsthalle, a structure as yet non-existent in Venice. And the top floor would be allocated to scientific laboratories for the use of art scholars.