{RE}casting Excursion: Venice_The Beguiled City.

This project is an ecological response to the tourism industry in Venice. It forms 3 decoy Islands that question & challenge the relationship between authentic and reproduced experience. Located at external entrances to the Lagoon, consisting of a series of interconnected programs, creating new mediating landscapes between Venice and the tourist.

This project is conceived as a critical ecological response to the dominant tourism industry in Venice. The thesis establishes a series of analogous decoy fields that both question the relationship between authentic and reproduced experience and, as a reminder of Tafuri’s warning that Venice is a “cadaver liquefying before our very eyes,” acts as a physical repository of a future lost-city. Fragments of Venetian architecture and culture were explored through the perspective of the tourist, in the form of physical models, maps and other drawings. These explorations offered a new understanding of the impact of tourism on the city of Venice. This design proposal was visually explored and represented through precise moments in a similar fashion. The use of forced perspective and collages allow for certain aspects of the project to be revealed to the observer -- just as Venice has become engineered over time to seem visually appealing to its visitors. Located at entry points between the Adriatic Sea and the Lagoon and constituted as a series of Islands with interconnected programs, it creates new mediating landscapes between Venice and the tourist. It combines the regimented program of a Cruise Ship - with the visual vitality of the city to simulate a heterotopic tourist experience. This project also draws attention towards the pollution of the Lagoon by the six hundred Cruise Ships that enter the Lagoon each year by becoming a site a retreat. It maintains the possibility of ordinary and everyday version of Venice being maintained inside the Lagoon in parallel - just now a less exaggerated version of itself. One may wonder what would draw the voyagers to this ‘New Venice’ when the existing has proved sufficient in fulfilling the needs of excursionists for many years? The task in this case is to create an even more attractive realm which fulfils the specific needs of the cruise ship excursionists – the objective of this project is to create an ideal Utopian destination for the cruise ship tourist. By luring the tourist away from existing city, it allows for Venice to become, once, again, a vibrant lived city.