Oliver Antoniu

This slideshow is part of: 2012–2013 Fellowship Recipients

I stayed for nearly two weeks in Venice, Italy, traveling through the city and the lagoon in an inflatable kayak, in which I could move freely through high and low tides, day and night, the lagoon and the open sea, and various abandoned islands. The city also hosted many opportunities for research, particularly the Museum of Naval History and the Biblioteca Marciana. A naval bookstore I discovered early on in the trip became ‘home base,’ the owner frequently advising me throughout my stay.

A number of architectural revelations crucial to the reframing of my project were documented through photography, video, and drawing:
 
- Structures and landforms can assemble/disassemble the horizon. On grey days the sky and sea bend in continuum, erasing it.

- Tidal currents, asynchronous with the solar day, provide a pendular rhythm and directionality of movement within the city. Waves provide a truly topological spatial medium in aural, visual, and kinetic terms.

- The high tide fills and floats the city; massless, it reads in terms of surfaces. The low tide reveals a continuous ‘base’ element which structures sit on, rather than floating against the water. This allows the city to become readable in terms of mass.

- Algal vegetation that grows on surfaces exposed to water emphasizes this base. The color and density of the vegetation varies due to the amount of time it is exposed to air and sunlight or submerged underwater. This allows an observer to read the behavior of the tides outside the temporal realm.

- Between low and high tide, elements such as stairs, ledges, walls, etc. measure the datum of the water and merge into one another. Certain spaces and passages become accessible or inaccessible depending on the tide. The ground of the city is this indeterminate zone between high and low tides.

What has always been of key importance to my thesis is the way that edges between land and water are articulated. Being able to observe this site first-hand has supplemented large-scale geological phenomena, swathes of history, suppositions of science, and telescopic hunches with an architectural repertoire of parameters. These parameters were used to relate my utopian project with the spatial medium of water, the tide mediating between the two.

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

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