Boano Prišmontas ‘highlights’ a public square in Venice

Boano Prišmontas brought a magical and evocative atmosphere in a local working-class campiello (square) of Venice, within the Unfolding Pavilion. Gino Valle relied on a spatial grid of 165x165cm to regulate all spatial relations of Giudecca’s Social Housing complex. The installation aims to exhibit the process of abstraction and rational control over the space that happens in the architect’s mind. 

The goal was to expose this process in the real world, showing that the lines once drawn on the paper are not only symbols, grammar, language, but they ‘are’ space and architecture. Lines and distances become squares, walls, structure, room sizes, alignments and imperceptible void boundaries that host our existence and shape our perception of space.

“It is actually remarkable that a city like Venice has been able in multiple instances to deal with its lumbering past and overwhelming beauty, opening opportunities for contemporary architectures that often dealt with the housing issues,” Prišmontas explains. “The iconic perception of Venice might lead to think that everything here is atypical and somehow suspended on an imaginary world. Instead, the city is alive, real and active, and full of inhabitants that are willing to proudly claim and defend their right to stay on the island. Unfortunately, the precious and fragile beauty of Venice, doesn’t cope well with the fast evolving dynamic of the world and the city almost inevitably had to consolidate its identity as a theme park at the mercy of tourism. But this is not the real Venice.”