It is not too usual, for a festival, to have its own “personal” home: Cannes has a Palais des Festivals, promptly rebuilt as soon as it showed signs of insufficiency, but Berlin, after years in city theaters, is now transforming Renzo Piano’s cinema at Potsdamer Platz into the Berlinale Palast every year. The Venice Film Festival was born in 1932 and had a home since 1937, designed by Luigi Quagliata on the Lido waterfront. The industry evolved rapidly, and just as quickly the building became too small, was integrated in different phases, a complete reconstruction was considered but ended up adding a volume to the facade, again designed by Quagliata, in 1952.

Moving forward to 1989, a competition by invitation sought 10 solutions for a completely new Palazzo del Cinema: Domus published them in September 1991, on issue 730, when they were announced in conjunction with the fifth Architecture Biennale. The submission cluster counted the rootedness in urban culture envisioned by Carlo Aymonino, the monumental organicism by Mario Botta and the landscape organicism by Sverre Fehn, the geometric fragmentation by Marlies Hentrup, Norbert Heyers and James Stirling, Steven Holl’s “temporal connection” – later Domus Guest Editor – Fumihiko Maki’s “glass palace”, Rafael Moneo’s design turning towards the city and Jean Nouvel’s design merging with the Lido, Aldo Rossi’s encompassing the existing palace, and O. M. Ungers’ systematizing the area within a rational grid. The reports of all these projects can be read in the Domus Digital Archive. Moneo would turn out to be the winner, but the project would never see the light of day, just as the winner of a further competition held in 2004, by 5+1AA and Rudy Ricciotti, would not.

The difference between the work of this Biennale’s Architecture Sector and that of its precedessors leaps to the eye. Everything is based on a simple but forcible idea: to replace an exclusively expositive programme by one in which the exhibition stage is only part of that programme. 

A simple idea, then, but certainly not an easy one to realize. For it was charged with three ambitions which the programme in effect achieved. Furthermore it was unencumbered by strictly methodical implications, in view of the, again propositive, role which our most distinguished cultural institutions are called upon to perform today. Indeed there are times (and perhaps the present is one of these) when rather than record events it becomes more important to provoke them. 

In promoting competitions by invitation for the reconstruction of the Italian Pavilion and for the rebuilding of the Palazzo del Cinema, the Biennale has in effect shown that its own requirements are substantially related to the more general needs of Venice as a whole. Competitions on the design of public buildings of this magnitude give the city a unique opportunity to debate the future of Venice itself. All this is also bound up with competitions as an institution, which in this country certainly has no edifying history behind it, cramped as it is, by a chronic inability to turn projects into reality. Nevertheless, the architecture competition remains, for better or worse, one of the principal means of determining and of stimulating the evolution of urban facts.

Now whilst the designing of the Italian Pavilion in the Giardini di Castello (see Domus 699) was the occasion for an interesting comparison between some of the best representatives of Italian architectural culture, in the case of the competition for the Palazzo del Cinema this comparison has widened to embrace the whole international panorama. The projects submitted are all of notable interest. Some are deeply fascinating and of great quality. They present a fairly timely and reliable analysis of the state of contemporary architecture. But they also afford an exceptional comparison on the theme of public buildings.

The competition brief concerned the restructuring of the present Palazzo del Cinema, in order to make it fully compliant to the Biennale’s activities and to other cultural events held at any time of the year. So there will be not just a Cinema Building any more, but a large and complex public building. 

The competition brief concerned the restructuring of the present Palazzo del Cinema, in order to make it fully compliant to the Biennale’s activities and to other cultural events held at any time of the year. So there will be not just a Cinema Building any more, but a large and complex public building.

To be sure, the principal aim of the whole scheme was this: to construct a major public building that would become a landmark for the whole urban community. Moreover, its very presence must be so strong as profoundly to affect the transformation of that part of the city in which it is situated. It can be understood therefore that from this point of view the topic is charged, in particular, with a lofty civil significance, and it was in that special sense that the architects were asked to create an architecture which could live up to these great expectations.

One last point to note is that the projects were rendered public before the winner was known. And in fact we are not publishing the final result here, of which we as yet have no knowledge. We feel that this singular circumstance, though anomalous, actually helps to heighten people’s interest in the results of the competition. The temporary suspension of judgement means that all ten of the projects submitted are still available for a possible transformation of the city. Their potential and their expectations thus remain intact. True, one of them will be realized and will materialize in Venice. But from the point of view of architecture, and not only of that discipline, the most important accomplishment lies precisely in their whole, in their representing – and at the highest level – a stage of real advancement in the debate on the future of this city. And this, despite everything, will remain.