HOUSE REFURBISHING VENICE

Venetian heritage renewed

The intervention involved the top floor of a historic 16th-century building in Campo S. Maurizio, next to the church of the same name, home of the Scuola di Santa Maria degli Albanesi, located on the corner between the narrow Calle del Piovan and the Rio del Santissimo. 

Client
Private
Year
1985
Status
Completed
Team
project Flavio Albanese

Flavio Albanese
founder & partner

Flavio Albanese (1951), is founder and president of ASA studio albanese. He is a self-educated designer, by combining his passion for contemporary art with the practical experience of an artisan-architect. Having come into contact with Carlo Scarpa, he learns from him to avoid an “a priori” approach to design, adapting on a case-by-case basis to the occasions, themes and contexts. He has held courses at the École Polytechinique Fédérale in Lausanne and at the Art Institute in Chicago (1980), at Yale University (1983), at the University of Architecture in Delft (2005), at the University of Florida (2006), at the Fundacion Proa de Buenos Aires (2008) and frequently at the most important Italian universities. He has also held two workshops at the international summer school of the Architecture School in Venice in 2009 and 2010. He was a member of the Confindustria Vicenza committee from 1998 to 2001, the Domus Academy Scientific Committee (2004-2005) and the MIart Committee of Honour (2009 and 2010), director of the Officina del Porto di Palermo (2006-2008), vice president of the Andrea Palladio Architecture Firms International Centre (2011-2015) and president of the Fondazione Teatro Comunale Città di Vicenza (2010-2016). From 2007 to 2010 he was asked to head Domus, the prestigious international architecture, design and contemporary art magazine. Active since 1971, in 1987 he founds with his brother Franco ASA studio albanese. The studio's projects were published by the most most important architecture and design magazines: the Neores project was selected for the Mies van der Rohe Foundation European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture (2003), and ASA studio albanese took part in Venice's Architecture Biennial in 2004 and 2006. Flavio is an avid reader and bibliophile (his library, which is open to the rest of the firm, contains more than 15.000 volumes) and he is a connoisseur and collector of contemporary art.

The apartment was designed adopting a series of materials and symbolic forms that recall the superb legacy of Venetian craftsmanship. The reference to Venezia is evident in the colours used: green, blue and grey are all around, flooding its walls, furnishings, walls and fixtures, thereby recalling the water that, from the canal outside, seems to flow through the house. The floors are made with large Murano glass tiles with a milled surface, with small traces of gold mosaic running through: gold tiles that also appear in the décor designed by the studio and on the doors, like Byzantine calligraphy.

 

 

The Venetian house has been published on Casa Vogue n. 166 September 1985 and on the volume "Venice: The art of Living" by Frederic Vitoux (Author), Jerome Darblay (Illustrator) , Stewart Tabori & Chang Publishing, New York, 1991