2007 | Europe / Italy / La Spezia

La Spezia Waterfront

The project is the result of a dialectical process, for which the water-architecture dualism proposed by this meeting is a specification of the more general one between nature and artifice or, to express it better, between pre-existence and intervention. An architecture project always springs from the necessity to modify an existing situation and to overcome a more or less high level of criticality. It is thus an answer to a question that represents the starting point of any design reasoning. The plan must thus necessarily draw its contents from the careful examination of the original body of data, which determined the need for transformation.

The designer, drawing on his own cultural background, provides the answers. The competition for the design of La Spezia’s waterfront arises from the need to revisit the city’s strategic objectives, bringing them back to an urban dimension that seeks, on one hand, a new compatibility between industrial and tourism development introducing commercial, tertiary, and accommodation functions and, on the other, the recovery of the city’s relationship with the sea. Today the relationship between La Spezia’s citizens with the sea is almost always denied and, where it is still possible, it appears strongly influenced by the presence of the harbor structures that prevent the possibility to reassert, or at least let continue, the values that have characterized the place’s identity.

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