Archinect - News

UNESCO adds 42 new sites to World Heritage list

2023-09-22T13:06:00-04:00

The outcome of the 45th session of the committee has also been notable, however, for the places not approved for protection. On Friday, members voted against the notion that Venice be added to the heritage list. This was despite the recommendation of the World Heritage Centre (WHC), the convention’s permanent secretariat, which argued the city was at risk due to factors including mass tourism and climate change.

A total of 42 new sites were added at the ongoing special session held in Riyadh this month. Three Ukrainian sites, including the 11th-century Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, were also added last week at the start of the 15-day meeting.

The body’s recommendations to add Venice to the list of World Heritage in Danger sites was also denied at the outset, keeping it away from the dubious position despite criticism that city officials — who’ve just adopted a nominal daily entry fee trial — aren’t doing enough to resolve “long-standing but urgent issues” stemming from tourists’ overcrowding and climate change.

Venice to begin seeking €5 daily admission fees from tourists

2023-09-07T12:02:00-04:00

The ability for Venice to charge a nominal €5 ($5.35 USD) daily entrance fee to tourists has been granted to the city, giving officials the final go-ahead for a response they say is ultimately necessary to preserve its architectural heritage from the threats of climate change and overcrowding.

The city council’s decision comes after a protracted debate over its implementation since the idea was first introduced in 2019. CNN has reported the experiment will start first with a 30-day trial period before being formally adopted early next year, limited to only the “peak days” of the busy tourist season. The likely result is for the quality of life of residents to be improved, proponents say while encouraging other popular international destinations to potentially follow suit.

“The message we want to put across is that Venice is open, but visitors must understand that we need proper planning to manage the balance between residence and tourism,” Councilor Michele Zuin said in a statement....

UNESCO experts recommend adding Venice to heritage danger list

2023-08-01T11:15:00-04:00

[Update, September 14th, 2023: Despite this recommendation, UNESCO ultimately voted not to place Venice on its World Heritage in Danger list]

Experts from UNESCO, the cultural agency of the United Nations, have recommended adding Venice to its World Heritage in Danger list. As reported by Reuters, officials from the UNESCO World Heritage Centre made the recommendation with a view that Italy was not doing enough to protect the city from the impacts of climate change and mass tourism.

Both the city and its lagoon would be added to the list under the recommendation. Other sites recommended for the list are the historic centers of Kyiv, Lviv, and Odesa in Ukraine, the town of Timbuktu in Mali, and several sites across Syria, Iraq, and Libya. The final decision will be made at a meeting of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre in Riyadh in September.

"Resolution of long-standing but urgent issues is hindered by a lack of overall joint strategic vision for the long-term preservation of the prop...

Venice installs temporary glass barriers at St Mark’s Basilica to prevent flooding

2022-12-05T11:22:00-05:00

New glass barriers have successfully prevented a high tide from flooding St Mark’s Basilica in Venice for the first time [...] The wall is intended as a temporary solution until work will be carried out to raise the pavement level of St Mark’s Square. Writing on Twitter, tourism councillor Simone Venturini praised the structure and added, 'Now it’s time to accelerate the completion of the MOSE works for definite safety of the square.'

The barriers were enacted after emergency planning officials decided on not to raise the city’s brightly colored MOSE system for aqua alta events under 120cm, leaving the square and Basilica, technically the lowest point in Venice, out to dry at just 64cm (24 inches) above sea level. Mario Piana, the Proto for St. Mark's, is credited with the design of the barriers.

Near-record flooding last month provided an early successful test for both systems, preventing a repeat of the November 2019 near-catastrophe that aged parts of the building “20 years in a day” according to Carlo Alberto Tesserin, the official in charge of historic preservation for the Basilica’s Procuratoria governing body.

Anish Kapoor is remodeling a grand Venetian palace to be the new home of his foundation

2021-08-03T19:04:00-04:00

An 18th-century palazzo fronting Venice’s Cannaregio Canal is getting a bespoke makeover thanks to funds of a blue-chip British artist.

The Art Newspaper is reporting that the Palazzo Manfrin will be the new home of the Amish Kapoor Foundation following a renovation that will add a studio space, gallery, and art depository to a former school with help from UNA studio and local firm FWR Associati.

The original Palazzo was kept as the seat of the Priuli family until the 19th century when it formed an early version of the Galléria dell’Accademia before eventually falling into disrepair like many of the city’s other grand palaces in the shadow of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection nearby.

Per UNA studio: “The Palazzo Priuli Manfrin presents an architecture virtually unique in Venice. Its double-height hall is of typical Palladian design and its facade, without ornament, make this building the prototype of the Neoclassical style that is rarely found elsewhere in Venice.”

Related on Archi...

UNESCO rulings loom for Liverpool, Venice and 250 other sites in the midst of preservation battles

2021-07-16T17:08:00-04:00

The world heritage committee of the UN’s cultural agency Unesco on Friday began debating its list of World Heritage Sites, with Australia and Britain furious over looming changes to the status of the Great Barrier Reef and the historic docks in the city of Liverpool.

UNESCO's World Heritage Committee has a very full plate owing to the cancellation of last year's meeting over fears of the spreading coronavirus. Applications of sites like the famed porticoes of Bologna are also up for review.

The historic Liverpool docks played an outsized role in the transatlantic slave triangle and are in desperate need of preservation as construction encroaches.

Venice is also on the verge of losing its status as a World Heritage Site in a move that could devastate preservation efforts in the coastal Italian city.

France 24 has more on the Friday meeting here.

Venice is experiencing severe flooding

2019-11-14T17:00:00-05:00

Venice was reeling after experiencing its highest level of floodwater since 1966. High tides from the lagoon reached more than 6 feet higher than their usual level—the second-highest ever seen since records began in 1923. Two people were reported dead. Waters entered the nave of St. Mark’s Basilica and parts of the La Fenice opera house, left boats deposited on the canalside paving stones and in the middle of city streets, and surged across more than 80 percent of the city’s surface.

Feargus O'Sullivan, writing in CityLab, reports on the devastating flooding that has impacted Venice, Italy, where five of the 20 worst floods in the city's history have occurred over the last ten years.

Aside from being located on a spit of land in the northern Adriatic sea, Venice has subsided over 8 inches in the last century. The city is currently in the midst of constructing a large-scale $6.5 billion flood control system that is nearly complete. It is expected that the so-called MOSE flood barrier will be completed by 2021.

New report urges Venice to get its climate change act together

2019-07-17T07:00:00-04:00

Venice is full of water, Venice floods, the climate is visibly changing, and sea levels are rising, so you would expect Venice, of all places, to have an official strategy for what to do about it—but you would be wrong. The management plans produced by the City of Venice for Unesco in 2013 and 2018 barely mention the subject and twice, in 2016 and 2019, Unesco’s World Heritage Committee has failed to call them out on this astonishing failing.

"We are used to thinking that, given enough will and money, there is a solution to everything, but this report says that we must get used to the idea that in many cases there will be no solution," writes a frustrated Anna Somers Cocks for The Art Newspaper and explains how a new report by the International Council on Museums and Sites (Icomos) could lay out an urgently needed roadmap for climate change action for cultural heritage sites. "It emphasises again and again: collaborate, share knowledge and remedies, educate, and—above all—plan ahead. Then only may we be able to mitigate the approaching catastrophe."

In other recent Venice-related news: the 17th International Architecture Exhibition just announced a guiding vision for the 2020 Venice Biennale.

Salvatore Settis on the "the commercial rape of Venice"

2018-03-29T14:15:00-04:00

Venice is doomed, says, Salvatore Settis, unless there is a moral revival in Italy. He is a professor of archaeology who has been an advisor on cultural matters to the Italian government and was head of the Getty Center for the Arts and the Humanities in the 1990s. Italians know him from his eloquent denunciations in the press, which say that everything that has made La Bella Italia so beautiful is going to hell in a handcart.

The Art Newspaper reviews If Venice dies, the new book by former Getty Center for the Arts and the Humanities director, Salvatore Settis, and elaborates on his warning calls of La Serenissima's impending doom: "Venice, he emphasises repeatedly, is a paradigm for other cities around the world in the tensions between its historic nature and modern needs, in the delicate relationship between the built city and the environment and in the rush to exploit it for short-term gain."

Venice Lagoon declared most endangered heritage site in Europe

2016-03-17T15:37:00-04:00

The Venice Lagoon is the most endangered heritage site in Europe, declared the pan-European heritage organisation Europa Nostra at an event today [...]. Rising sea levels, swelling number of tourists, large cruise ships in the lagoon, the erosion of the sea bed, dredging deeper channels and the lack of an agreed management plan for Venice has created a perfect storm of threats to the city’s preservation.

Previously in the Archinect news:

Unesco threatens to put Venice on its Heritage at Risk list

2014-10-16T15:24:00-04:00

Unesco, which for too long has been silent on the growing environmental threat to Venice and its evident mismanagement, as revealed by the exposure of massive corruption in the construction of its flood barriers, has at last shown its teeth. At the meeting of its World Heritage Committee in Doha this June it passed important resolutions that show that it intends to call the Italian government to account and put Venice on its World Heritage at Risk list if it is not satisfied.

Previously: Leading museum directors, artists and architects call on Italian government to ban giant ships from Venice

Leading museum directors, artists and architects call on Italian government to ban giant ships from Venice

2014-07-24T13:20:00-04:00

More than 50 leading figures from the worlds of art, film, fashion and architecture have signed a petition calling for a ban on giant cruise ships sailing through Venice. [...] Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery in London, Richard Armstrong, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation, the architect Norman Foster and his wife Elena also endorse the appeal which has been launched by the Association of the International Private Committees for the Safeguarding of Venice [...].

Pierre Cardin cancels vast skyscraper behind Venice

2013-07-10T12:18:00-04:00

Opposition to the project began last year among Venetians and Italians, who are tired of seeing Venice abused by the vast cruise ships and mounting examples of the crudest commercialism.

Previously:

"called Palais Lumière, [it] will be a glittering menagerie of private apartments, hotels, commercial spaces and even a fashion university, and it would transform a dilapidated industrial area bordering the Venetian lagoon. Mr. Cardin has described the Palais, actually three structures linked by six flat discs, as a “habitable sculpture” and said it was his dream. — NYT"

A futuristic vision for Venice

2012-12-07T18:54:00-05:00

called Palais Lumière, [it] will be a glittering menagerie of private apartments, hotels, commercial spaces and even a fashion university, and it would transform a dilapidated industrial area bordering the Venetian lagoon. Mr. Cardin has described the Palais, actually three structures linked by six flat discs, as a “habitable sculpture” and said it was his dream.

Elisabetta Povoledo writes about fashion designer Pierre Cardin's plans for a towering “habitable sculpture” designed to take advantage of the latest in "ecologically sustainable technologies" adjacent to the Venice lagoon in an industrial area. Conservationists fear it could imperil the Venetian lagoon’s ecosystems