The Third Landscape
The Third Landscape Project emerges from the speculative reconfiguration of the Venetian Lagoon into three hydrological territories — northern, central, and southern — each defined by distinct ecological rhythms and infrastructural intentions. In this scenario, the lagoon becomes a stratified landscape of differentiated futures: the central basin, encircling historic Venice, is deliberately enclosed by new embankments to form a carefully managed water body. This controlled condition prioritizes urban continuity and flood protection, yet severs the basin from the lagoon’s natural tidal pulse. Conversely, the northern and southern basins remain open to full tidal exchange, allowing salt marshes, mudflats, and other fragile habitats to regenerate, drift, and reform through unconstrained ecological processes.
This partitioning introduces a critical tension — the central lagoon’s stability is secured at the expense of its ecological dynamism, while the peripheral lagoards reclaim their freedom to evolve as living, shifting landscapes. Responding to this trade-off, The Third Landscape Project positions itself not as a corrective but as an interpretive framework that reweaves Venice’s relationship with its lagoon through situated, prototype-based interventions.
Working within the logics of the three-lagoon framework, the project develops a series of prototypical spatial strategies that emerge from existing landscape conditions. In the central lagoon, interventions cultivate a deliberately anthropocentric relationship, acknowledging the necessity of human-managed stability in a sealed hydrological environment. In the northern and southern basins, prototypes instead support ecological autonomy, amplifying the lagoon’s self-generative capacities and embedding architecture within processes of sedimentation, succession, and tidal morphodynamics.
Through this calibrated gradient — from human-centered maintenance to ecological self-organization — the project proposes a new territorial ethic for the Venetian Lagoon: one that embraces difference rather than homogenization, and positions design as a mediator between protection, regeneration, and the evolving life of the lagoon itself.
