VICTOR BAHNA
Rising Dream: Protecting Venice
Clark Honors College thesis
Location: Venice, Italy
Committee Members: Hans Minder, Jenny Young, Nancy Cheng, Kate Mondloch
Background, Summary, Ideas
When I got to study abroad in Siena for the first time in 2022, I was able to spend a week in the beautiful city of Venice. With each passing day, I became more enamored with the city, allowing myself to get lost in its labyrinthine streets of ornate walls and crumbling plaster, eventually finding my way into a small, obscure campo aside a bridge along a canal. I sat on the edge of the canal and took in the peace, looking across the canal at a crumbling seventeenth-century palazzo as the setting sun painted its walls in various golden hues. The water gently lapped up against the building as the nearby bell tower of San Francesco della Vigna rang out seven o'clock in the evening. Someone in a nearby building began playing piano. Passerby stopped to listen, and people in the dilapidated palazzo even momentarily came to the window. In that brief moment with the calm music and the 24-carat light, any troubles I had seemed to be carried by the music and washed away in the calm canal waters below me.
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This moment formed a core memory that I now associate with Venice - not San Marco or Rialto which are choked out with overtourism, but the hidden parts of the city with residents, where magical moments happen. It also got me thinking about the fate of Venice, and the predictions that it was to eventually sink into the water, gone forever. This spurred me to write my thesis, and write it about the protection of Venice. In short, how could the architecture of Venice itself be modified to be more water-resilient while not compromising the building or city's integrity?
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The first task was picking an archetypal building that would be valuable enough to save, but not so valuable that it's a museum or symbol of the city. In other words, an old palazzo that may be apartments now. That faded palazzo that I sat across made the perfect case study for me; it had certainly been converted to apartments, not to mention the deterioration of plaster and bricks on the building itself. After doing some research, I got the name of it as "Palazzo Celsi poi Donà," or more simply "Palazzo Celsi-Donà," and this is also when I learned its construction period as the 17th century.
The thesis challenged me in ways of thinking about both enclosures and more complicated matters of historical preservation. Studies went into both vernacular and new building materials, as well as how walls can be modified to preserve critical features such as upper story walls and floor joists. This resulted in two architectural solutions being proposed to prevent building deterioration from water: a simpler version that uses vernacular materials and could be done at more of a DIY scale, and a more complex version where the wall is mostly/fully rebuilt on the inside, which would be more desirable for institutions.
