The Mail
The Mail is an installation that took part at the Unfolding Pavillon 2018.
The Unfolding Pavilion is an expanding exhibition and editorial project founded by Daniel Tudor Munteanu and Davide Tommaso Ferrando, which pops-up at major architecture events in previously inaccessible but architecturally significant buildings. In the second edition it temporarily inhabited one of the most spectacular architectures of Venice, Gino Valle’s Social Housing Complex (1984-86).
In a historical context where emergency housing has reached alarming levels and in a city such as Venice, which is characterized by the phenomenon of the gentrification, it seems crucial to look at the issue of social housing from a new perspective of both pertinence and creativity.
One of today's biggest problems, especially in terms of social housing, is that the family has been the only reference. What happens when these conditions are no longer justifiable?
The case of the Gino Valle residences at Giudecca island allows us to consider this question in more depth; it is not just about adapting, in many cases of modern housing complexes, it’s also about protection. However, is it possible to consider these buildings not only as architectural masterpieces, but also as containers for interpreting the needs of the present?
In the Giudecca complex, if on the one hand the duplexes and the tower typologies still continue to respond to a given need, on the other hand the twenty triplex - like the one of the Unfolding Pavillon - seem oversized compared to the contemporary family standards. Similarly, the galleries, representative elements of a collective dwelling, are often inanimate and deprived of the principles on which Valle was conceived in 1987, as an "immense collective apartment". Reconsidering the priority of recovering the image of a small, active, participatory town means redensifying these spaces through a new concept based no longer on "private property", but instead on the idea of "use".
Based on this consideration, The Mail is an utopic missive sent by the City of Venice. The letter welcomes the winners of a call for an experimental cohousing called CO’ Valle created in 2020, readapting the twenty triplex of the Gino Valle complex. [30 x 20 x 12 cm, plexiglass and paper]
