BEYOND SANT’ELENA

This catalog extends and articulates the discussions initiated this year within the VIDE workshop, developed by the Faculté d'Architecture La Cambre Horta - Université libre de Bruxelles. This work will be carried on next year as part of an international project-based research workshop (invited partners: IUAV Venezia, UCLouvain LOCI, ENSA Marseille and the University of Stuttgart).

On the eastern edge of Venice, the Sant'Elena district is a unique territory, both marginal and strategic, caught between urban memory, modernist heritage and contemporary fragility. The void created by the expected departure of Venezia FC soccer club from its historic Pier Luigi Penzo stadium, an insular enclave rooted in the local popular imagination, sends out a strong signal: a symbolic and physical disruption, a call to rethink the conditions of urbanity, use and appropriation of the area.

In this approach, emptiness is seen not as absence or loss, but as a latent power of transformation. It becomes the critical leverage for an exploration of the periphery, envisaged as spaces of resistance, friction and potential. This triggering void opens up a field of experimentation for architecture: not as a simple programmatic response, but as a capacity to formulate new spatial narratives, anchored in the intricacies of reality.

The publication examines the dialectical relationship between tradition and modernity, between inherited forms and the dynamics of anticipation, between structured continuities and inevitable alterations. It articulates critical interpretations, sensitive map-making, narratives of habitability and prospective projects, to show the margins as laboratories of alternatives, where the architectural project engages in a recomposition of the common.

More than just a catalog, BEYOND SANT'ELENA is a collective archive, a critical research tool and a spatial manifesto, supported by the pedagogical and theoretical experience of the VIDE laboratory.