LCV. Law Court Offices in Venice | C+S Architects

The project is a winning entry of an international competition. The building is a graft in the complexity of the Venetian urban system facing Piazzale Roma, the car-entrance space to the city of Venice. At the same time it becomes the 'infrastructure' which brings an existing 19th century complex factory (Ex-Manifattura Tabacchi) to a contemporary use: in fact it houses the the technological systems  serving the whole. The dimension of the building is measured on the huge void of Piazzale Roma facing the bridge of Santiago Calatrava, on the opposite side. We work manipulating the program, the typology, the scale and the matter. The new program proposes a hybrid typology being at the same time a building and an infrastructure as the volume, together with some law-court offices and archives, houses all the systems which enable the urban system of the Ex-Manifattura Tabacchi to work again, regaining for the city its system of public spaces. The second topic is related to the scale, typology and matter. Facing the urban skyline of Piazzale Roma, the simple and compact shape of the new volume, is a distorted contemporary teza both in plan and section which connects the skyline of the multi-storey parking lots to the smaller Venetian urban texture. On Piazzale Roma the volume doesn’t touch the ground. A five meters long cantilliver draws the pedestrian flows inside. Thanks to the pre-oxidation process of the copper which wraps the building (copper in Venice represents institutional buildings) we investigate and instigate the action of time in architecture and the building is turned into a big roof, a shadow, a translation, belonging both to history ad contemporary.