HERITAGE & HISTORIC BUILDINGS PROJECT REPORT
BUILDING PROJECTS
T FONDACO DEI TEDESCHI VENICE
Italian renaissance
OMA’s transformation of a former 13th century Venetian palazzo into a department store on the Grand Canal shows how sensitive architectural interventions can successfully respect a multi-layered historic structure. Stephen Cousins reports
he T Fondaco dei Tedeschi, located beside the iconic Rialto Bridge on Venice’s Grand Canal, has been referred to as the building equivalent of a historical ‘palimpsest,’ or manuscript. This is because it incorporates an array of preservation and reconstruction techniques spanning several centuries. The 9,000 m2
T building started life as a
13th Century palazzo used as a trading post for German merchants, and was twice destroyed by fires, then rebuilt in its current form in 1506.
The building was converted into a customs house in the 17th century, and significant structural changes were carried out in the 1930s, under Mussolini, to trans- form it into a post office. In 1987 it was listed as a Monument, restricting permissi- ble alterations.
Fast forward to today and the Fondaco has taken on a distinctly 21st Century guise as a high end department store, occupied by tenants DFS of Hong Kong, its many historic layers exposed to view alongside new architectural interventions and plush interiors.
The large-scale architectural additions and preservation works were carried out by Netherlands-based architects OMA, headed up by founder Rem Koolhaas and partner Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli. The internal retail vision was developed by UK-based Jamie Fobert Architects.
A key aim for the latest reworking of the Fondaco was to demystify the ‘sacred’ image of a historical building, explains Laparelli: “Historical buildings in Italy are, in the majority of cases, considered immutable monuments to be preserved free of transformation or adaptation. Our project refutes the idea of declaring one
ADF FEBRUARY 2017
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