The Lift

The Lift Venice is unreal, it’s an island off the world detached from the reality of men. The tourist doesn’t visit Venice, he visits a postcard, a frozen city he fantasizes. For him, the city is a sequence of images he has built, an imaginary shared by all. For the tourist, the Venetian is the pizza cook, the tourist guide, the gift shop salesman.

Venice is also a theater, the setting of plots, dramas and mysteries. It’s as if it had been built for the needs of a movie, like an Italian Hollywood at the scale of a city. But this scenery became meretricious, copied and recopied by amusement parks, it no longer has the value it used to have. Like every scenery, it is not permanent.

By dint of not existing, Venice will sink. It inevitably drowns in the waves like the figure of a tragedy whose fate is. The same way that its reality has finally disappeared in people’s mind, the city will disappear in the lagoon as she never existed. She will become a new Atlantis, relegated to an imaginary city.

The lift is the machinery that will save Venice !

Just like a stage set, Venice needs a machinery to operate. This mechanism is the technical and pragmatical solution brought to an unreal and dreamlike city. Only the intervention of modernity can anchor Venice in it’s reality.

The lift consider the city as a single element by supporting it entirely with a superstructure, a kind of mobile platform. Like mooring pole, giant needles are planted through Venice into the ground. The superstructure goes up along these needles, saving the city from a certain death. The needles are fed by the energy of water, wind and sun making the system autonomous

Venice may then be recreated symmetrically under the old city, underwater. A modern replica filled with tourism facilities her ancestor couldn’t bear anymore. The old city is washed from the tourist’s fantasies. It becomes again an inhabited city and not the visited city it was. The new city can grow indefinitely underwater, it can evolve without the old city knowing it

Underwater, it’s the fantasy and the dream. Over water it’s the reality and the rationality.