Vesper No. 7 | Sky | Fall-Winter 2022
Lina Malfona
A Mannerist Interior. Venice’s New Casino
Keywords
Casino,
Venice, Mannerism, bordering, introverted landscape
Built to be
the ‘first American-style casino in Italy’ the extension to the
Ca’ Noghera casino, designed by Enrico Dusi and Matteo Ghidoni together
with the company Sinergo, is not part of an integrated system of amenities
connected to the theme of gambling, but rather appears as an isolated and
jarring object if compared to the surrounding landscape. The project proposal
for the extension to the Venice casino was the result of constant negotiation
– bordering on gambling – between architects and clients on the
dimensions proposed by the tender, which was expanded several times in the
course of the project to ensure different uses of the structure over a 24-hour
period.
The notion
of an interior as a parallel and continuous space – which had intrigued
Robert Venturi so much and which can be considered as the most innovative
achievement of Mannerism – is used here as a key to understanding the
project. It is an introverted landscape, a world definitively trapped inside an
interior, where every force appears subjected to a ruthless discipline,
paralysed. If the ambiguous and allusive charm is what makes Mannerism a
suprahistorical and still relevant condition today, the ambiguity of Dusi and
Ghidoni’s work is instead what inextricably binds their project to the
place and perhaps also to our time.
contacts
t. +39 041 257 1542