Compagnia della Vela, S.Giorgio Island, Venice

It is an intervention on one of the buildings of the Maritime Center, founded in 1952 by Giorgio Cini Foundation to host approximately 600 boys, between internal at the college and external, orphan from sailors and fishermen to give them a professional education and launch them to sea life. The new project aims, trough the building restoration, the new use as Nautical Sports Center (Centro Sportivo Nautico di Eccellenza – CDV), through the renewal of the interiors, the fusion between existing architecture and natural surroundings, with particular care to the preservation and requalification of the landscape, to the accessibility and the use of the sea shore and the nearby water space, to the promotion and development of sea Culture.

For what concerns the surroundings, the interventions are finalized to the preservation of the existing values through the care and strengthening of trees and plants that are in a critical pathological condition. The intervention does not in any way modify the relationship between built, open paved spaces, the green and the lagoon. Furthermore the maintenance of existing trees assures the preservation of landscape values of the area of the island where the project is located. All the new distributive choices are having as a goal the relationship between internal spaces, the improvement of the impact of the preserved building to the character of the Landscape and the area of intervention and to improve the perception of the landscape.

For all of those reasons the intervention on the external of the building are limited to the substitution of old window frames with new one with vision on the lagoon, within the respect a single large sheet of glass, to guarantee the minimalism of intervention and the maximum of the character of the twentieth-century building, its typology and materials. All interventions are inspired by the desire of creating a sustainable architecture and in this direction all the technical and design choices are orientated to achieve the Class A energetic Certification, according to DPR nr. 59 of 02/04/09 and LEED Gold certificate (Leadership Energy Environmental Design), released by Green Building Council Italy.

The centrality of the educational role of the sailing school, designed, for what concerns sports facilities, according to the CONI regulations, has as a prime goal in all the distributional and architectural choices the accessibility of able-bodied and differently able athletes. The rooms at +1,99 mt. on sea level are dedicated to all the sport activities of Compagnia Della Vela, and specially to boat storage, teaching, fitness and the hosting of the students. At +5,85 on sea level are located all social activities, and teaching activities like The International Sailing School, open all year long, the Library of the Sea and the Wind, a large multifunctional hall for sport and cultural events, restoration, the Club House of a society linked with the most renewed Clubs of the world, a meteorological station; all those spaces are reconfigurable and possible to be administrated in an autonomous way, and in anyway characterized by the vision and use of the extraordinary surroundings.