Author Description

For more than a millennium and a half, the city of Venice has evolved in the vitalizing and restless realms of the lagoon. Within this cultural environment, pilings offered holds to boats and fixpoints to people. Moreover, they generated spaces for urban activity as well as for human contemplation. Thanks to pilings, the liquid and horizontal surfaces become spaces for heterogeneous urban practices. Like poles of an electro-magnetic field, the piles in the waters of Venice delineate intermediate spaces in a city of becoming. Complex yet overlooked, the pilings of Venice provide spatial and cultural hieroglyphs of a magic city.