This project considers the Venetian lagoon as a unique laboratory en plein air. For the duration of six months the 5.500.000 ha of the lagoon were a place to investigate experimentally possible foundations and complements capable of sustaining architectural discourse. Poetic backgrounds met a concern with concrete constructive factors and vice versa and an a strictly experimental approach, attentive to contemporary spatial phenomena, aimed at developing original and non-repetitive responses, was practiced.

For this process it was essential to practice an attitude that considered the profound relationships and continuous exchanges that architecture has with the other applied arts, with the visual arts, but also with literature and all sciences. This was done by channeling data and information about the lagoon from areas such as biology, geography, physics, art and sociology, etc. through the discipline of architecture. Each time the potential of a set of information was experimentally assessed inside and through the field defined by the tools, protocols and procedures of architectural design.

Building on the most recent developments and following the tradition of comparisons, approaches to architecture were implemented which, as part of their socio-cultural responsibility, contribute to the ‘Errettung der äußeren Wirklichkeit’ (Siegfried Krakauer).

Starting from the relationship of architecture with the dimension of landscape, some fundamental questions of architecture were experimentally interrogated such as its physical dimension, the condition of continuous co-presence of multiple scales involved and the ability to invent and decline complex, unconventional programmes.

The experimental work with materials, bodies, spaces, devices, spatial effects, but not only, were an opportunity to experiment a potential architecture made mainly of space and time, imagined in extremis even without built.