The city of Venice begins work on the citadel of sports practice and culture, a project promoted by Mayor Luigi Brugnaro, who has entrusted the general conception and design of the masterplan to the studio Marazzi Architetti.
The project was conceived with the aim of offering the community a new ‘place’ intended not only for professional competitions but also for everyday sports practice, the promotion of social inclusion, raising awareness of environmental issues and spreading the culture of health and psycho-physical wellbeing.
The project is located in an area of 115 hectares in the Tessera quadrant, near the Marco Polo airport: a location that is easily accessible thanks to the already existing connections with the airport infrastructure and those under construction, such as the new railway link road and its station.
A careful reading of the territory has made it possible to identify the presence of the Boschi di Mestre (Mestre Woods), typical lowland woods surrounding the inhabited nuclei, as the key element inspiring the landscape strategy: the landscape takes the stage and pervades the area affected by the urban transformation, with 62.5 hectares of woodland, 16.5 hectares of equipped green spaces and about 60,000 new trees, half of which are tall trees. A new green corridor is thus generated, connecting the Dese river with the northern lagoon.
For the new stadium and the covered arena, the Marazzi Architetti studio has designed true ‘narrative architecture’, capable of dialoguing with the scenery of the Bosco and the precious Venetian context.
The new stadium emerges as a discrete and elegant presence, expressing a strong territorial identity and the profound environmental and landscape vocation of the entire project. The structure is wrapped in a ‘natural skin’ that composes a homage to recurring images of the lagoon landscape, such as the reeds or the sequences of poles and ‘briccole’ used for mooring gondolas and signalling waterways.
On the other hand, the vibrant and iconic structure of the covered arena is inspired by the roller glass windows typical of Murano production, made of coloured glass discs, assembled and bound together with metal profiles. The external cladding thus conceived also recalls the noble tradition of Venetian palace architecture, in which the façade and its reflections on the water mediate and render more harmonious the relationship between the volumes and mass of the building with the urban and lagoon landscape.
Both structures are conceived to ensure maximum versatility of use thanks to flexible solutions such as retractable grandstands and modular walls, as well as ample service and support spaces to efficiently and quickly manage the transformations and refitting of spaces.Architectures and infrastructures blend harmoniously with trees and nature, in a planivolumetric declination that recalls a DNA strand or a complex cellular system, in which each element contributes to the efficiency and life of the system itself. The result is a well-equipped park, where professional sport, daily amateur practice, training, recreation and entertainment coexist, and, conceived as elements in relation to each other, there is a 16,000 spectator football and rugby stadium, a 10,000 spectator multifunctional indoor arena for sporting competitions (basketball, volleyball, handball, boxing, five-a-side football, tennis), concerts and shows, and 8,000 square metres of outdoor sports facilities (fitness, skateboard and pump track areas, including basketball, volleyball and five-a-side football pitches).
For more info: www.marazziarchitetti.com/progetto/il-bosco-dello-sport-venezia-i/
