Lighthouse competition

While Venice's original entrance at St Mark's Square is wonderfully crafted with its campanile serving as a bell tower, beacon and one of the city’s landmarks, today’s entrance has shifted to the north-west. At present over 20 million visitors a year pour into the city through two new interfaces: the Piazzale Roma with its airport buses, cars and cruise passengers, and the adjacent Santa Lucia station and its forecourt, where all train services terminate.

Unlike St Mark's Square, the issue of entrance and crossing at these two places, the architectonic interface between the land and maritime system, is not addressed. The entrance to the city is, so to speak, through an 'undesigned backyard'.

This situation provides the theme of the assignment. Competition entrants are invited to design this entrance and undefined point of passage through a temporary and subversive intervention, a conversion/use of what is already there or a structural addition in order to allow a dialogue to be generated between the past and the present, between the transient and the monumental. The city should be seen as a stage.

In doing so, entrants can propose solutions either for just one place (the Piazzale Roma or Santa Lucia with the station) or select the two places together in their spatial context. The desired outcome is to have works which move within the area bordering stage design, art and architecture. The city space and its scenographic potential are therefore areas of emphasis in this competition.