In an ongoing series exploring the effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on the cities involved, our next stop is Venice, the original end point of the medieval Silk Road, with ambitious plans for modern expansion as part of the New Silk Road.
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In March this year Italy became the first major Western power to endorse China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In doing so the country smoothed the way for some major transformations in its trade infrastructure, particularly in the historic port cities of Trieste, Genoa and, above all, Venice.
Echoes of Marco Polo’s travels along the medieval Silk Road are too tempting to ignore. Back then, in 1271 to be precise, the teenage Venetian sailed with his father and uncle to Acre, rode camels to the Persian port of Hormuz and continued on to the Shangdu summer palace of Yuan Chinese emperor Kublai Khan (the grandson of Genghis Khan), eventually spending several years as an advisor to the emperor. Upon his arrival back in Europe, the young merchant recounted his story to the romance writer Rustichello of Pisa, while both of them were imprisoned in Genoa (which was at war with Venice by the time Polo returned). The so-called Book of Marvels that emerged from this encounter became a bestseller and inadvertently reinvigorated European interest in trading with the Far East (Christopher Columbus was said to have carried a copy of the book on his voyage to what he thought was the eastern edge of China but actually turned out to be the Americas).
Expansion and Preservation
Venice has changed a lot since Polo’s time. After enjoying several more centuries as one of Europe’s preeminent maritime powers, it experienced a steady decline following the shift in European trade from the Near East to the New World, to which Venice had relatively less access compared to the Western European powers. By the early 20th Century, it became clear that the lagoon could no longer support trade on the scale suitable for maintaining competition with other Mediterranean ports. An extension was therefore built on the nearby mainland in Marghera which re-established the wider Venice region’s important position in Mediterranean maritime trade, while preserving historic Venice so that it could become one of world’s most popular tourist destinations.
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This same spirit of expansion and preservation has fuelled a new proposal to build an offshore port eight nautical miles off the mainland. The Venice Offshore-Onshore Port System (VOOPS), as it is called, is intended to provide Venice with a maritime port in deep waters outside the lagoon, thereby allowing the Port of Venice to handle the largest cargo ships that carry over 20,000 TEUs without causing disruption to the area around historic Venice. In the process, it will also link the Venice with the nearby ports of Chioggia, Porto Levante, Ravenna, as well as the inland ports of Mantua and Padua, the Greek port of Piraeus (also receiving the Belt and Road treatment), and markets across the central European mainland.
“Made in Italy”
The ultimate prize, however, is stronger links with Chinese and East Asian markets hungry for goods “Made in Italy”: Ferraris and Lamborghinis, Italian wine, food, fashion, art, interior design and all the many Italian products that remain synonymous with quality and luxury. Integration will also bring more Chinese tourists to Venice, a big destination for a population still inspired by the story of Marco Polo.
The problem is VOOPS was approved under the previous President of the Venice Port Authority Paolo Costa, who left the role in 2017. His replacement Pino Musolino has been considerably less enthusiastic about the plan, describing it as “pharaonic” in scope, totally out of proportion to the projected traffic passing through the upper Adriatic. While the project has not been outright rejected, its future is very much uncertain.
Populist Indecision
This indecision repeats itself on the national stage. Last year, elections delivered success for two populist parties, the Five Star Movement, who became the largest party, and the newly rebranded Lega (previously the northern Italian-focused Lega Nord), who led the largest coalition. After long negotiations, the two parties went into coalition together, with their two leaders, Luigi di Maio and Matteo Salvini each becoming deputy prime ministers under the premiership of compromise candidate and Independent politician Giuseppe Conte.
Whereas di Maio has been relatively positive about the Belt and Road Initiative, Salvini is much less enthusiastic, refusing to meet the Chinese President Xi Jinping when he visited earlier this year. Since the election, Salvini’s star has risen and the M5S popularity has plummeted, which means that it will likely be some time before Italy’s endorsement of the Belt and Road Initiative brings concrete results in Venice.
How is public space influenced by Germany’s past division into two separate states? This question is examined by the German contribution to this year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture, where Marianne Birthler, former Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, and Graft Architekten are the curators of the “Unbuilding Walls” project.
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It surely is a contrast-rich team that curated the German pavilion for the Biennale of Architecture in Venice, being made up of the politician Marianne Birthler and the three heads of the Graft architectural office, namely Lars Krückeberg, Wolfram Putz and Thomas Willemeit. Graft stands for modern architecture made in Los Angeles, Berlin and Peking, and Marianne Birthler embodies the critical voice of socialism: once an East German civil rights activist, she later went on to administer the Stasi files for many years. For their “Unbuilding Walls” Biennale project, the four investigated a special type of freespace – namely the empty spaces left behind following the fall of the Wall between the two Germanys.
The Wall had to disappear quickly
28 years have passed since Germany’s Reunification, the same length of time that the Wall existed, from 1961 until 1989. Accordingly the exhibition features 28 construction projects that provide an impression of what the former death strip looks like today. The zigzag border that cut Berlin into two was some 160 kilometres long and none too narrow: the East German “control strip” was 10 metres wide and the so-called “protective strip” another 500 metres. The vanishing of the Wall left behind a vacuum, a deep wound in need of healing – quite pragmatically initially. As curator Thomas Willemeit explains, “There was no overall strategy, no masterplan, but very obvious tasks straight away: bridges had to be rebuilt, suburban fast train lines reconnected, and then there was the question of reconstruction at certain neuralgic points.”
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In the city it was generally agreed that the Wall had to disappear quickly, at best with the former border being built over as if it had never existed. As Willemeit’s colleague Lars Krückeberg points out: “Everyone wanted to forget. Today, in contrast, if an escape tunnel is found, it’s like the discovery of a new grave in the Valley of the Kings, something that has to be preserved immediately and given listed monument status. This would never have occurred immediately after Reunification, so it’s all been a process. This has been an interesting realisation for us, namely that the culture of remembrance can be very dynamic”.
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In Venice the curators feature Aldo Rossi’s Schuetzenstrasse complex in Berlin as a prominent example of a planned strategy of forgetting in the guise of a conscious reference to tradition and history. The building plot – consisting of a section of Wall-related no-man’s-land with the paltry remains of Gründerzeit buildings as well as a complete block between Schützen, Charlotten, Markgrafen and Zimmer streets – seemed practically predestined for a programmatic project that the Italian Pritzker Prize winner described as a “homage to the typical late-19th-century architecture of Berlin” at the presentation of his design.
On 26th of May the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018 opened its gates to public. Until the 25th of November exhibitions around the loose topic “Freespace” can be visited. Curators of the 16th Biennale, the Irish architects Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, selected the theme to encourage architects working with the human scale. They should explore how “a generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity” can contribute to the built environment.
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Living Space
As always, many exhibitions deal with the topic of mass housing, which in times of urbanisation, rural flight and migration, is still a very current issue. A look back to the past was taken by the V&A Museum in London, which is also present with an exposition. A large piece of the famous brutalist housing project Robin Hood Gardens was transported to Venice. It is now part of the vision “Streets in the Sky” by the architects Alison and Peter Smithson.
This year’s winning exhibition also deals with living space and comes from Switzerland. Four scientific assistants from the ETH Zurich prepared an empty flat in which the proportions are overridden. With “Svizzera 240” they want to protest against the constraint of having a 240 centimetres ceiling height in every modern housing. The otherwise generic and provocative boring apartment increases in size from one side to the other, while also its furniture adapts the proportions.
Large-Scale Space
Other expositions took the topic on a larger scale. Segregation through walls are also a big subject these days. Beside the proposed fortification on Mexico’s border, also the Berlin wall attracts attention this year: It has now been down for longer that it stood. The German contribution “Unbuilding Walls” tells the story of a decade-long division of the country and shows examples like Checkpoint Charlie and the destroyed border village Jahrsau.
The British and the Belgian expositions deal with the role of the European Union. The British pavilion “Island” addresses the Brexit by offering a fantastic view over the other national pavilions, while it is left empty inside. With “Eurotropie”, Belgium reflects the symbolic presence of its capital Brussels for Europe. Both exhibitions offer space for encouraged discussions about the EU.
Walls are dividing lines. They cut areas apart, separating them both spatially and symbolically. What happens to places where walls were torn down and barbed wire fences were removed? The German Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice is supposed to offer answers to this question.
Titled “Unbuilding Walls”, this year’s contribution will display 28 examples that show how German society dealt with spatial voids along the former border wall after the fall of the German Democratic Republic, and discuss whether the wall still shapes the image of the city today. The area once occupied by the wall now randomly features new buildings or reconstructions of historic ones. Sometimes only voids remain.
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The exhibition is curated by Marianne Birthler, former Federal Commissioner for the Records of the Stasi (the former secret police of communist East Germany) and the Berlin-based architecture firm GRAFT.
Why did the curators select 28 examples? Germany’s history as a reunified country spans 28 years – and the Berlin Wall stood for the exact same amount of time, from 1961 to 1989. The exhibits include the future Axel Springer Media Campus along the former Berlin Wall death strip, Checkpoint Charlie, Friedrichstrasse – former border crossing and now tourist magnet, and the Iron Curtain bike trail. This year’s Biennale follows the theme of “Free Space”, which is why the German contribution “Unbuilding Walls” sets its focus on exemplary urban spaces and architecture.
The historical symmetry of 28 years before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall is an opportunity to research the effects of division and the processes of healing as dynamic spatial phenomena. The exhibition will feature images and experiences of what life surrounded by walls is like. Not only the German Cold War division, but contemporary international cases of barriers, fences, and walls will be in the spotlight as well.
The 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice begins on May 26th and ends on November 25th 2018.
