Between Sky and Sea
This project is born from an oil painting of 1979, “Porta per città di mare” (Door for sea cities), where Aliante appears in an ominous sky which looms over a landscape featuring construction of a large brick door.
Details of the door and Aliante have later been extrapolated from the painting and constructed. The first during the “Biennale di Venezia” in 1980, inside the architecture section, where it was asked from some architects to plan a certain number of “doors” for the Ropery of the Arsenal. Eleven years later, still during the same event, the second was realised.
Aliante has been installed at the entrance of the Ropery of Venice Arsenal in 1991, during the Fifth International Architecture Exhibition. It is the result from a painting in watercolours by Massimo Scolari. The structure has been later built: two large wings in laminated wood landed on imaginary ruins of a brick wall which, metaphorically, probably represents the passing of time, history and architecture. The same wings evoke a sort of a harmonious and perfect dream summoned by the same elements sustaining it.
Resting on the foundations of “Rio dell'Arsenale”, the two wings face each other and the surrounding space, appearing crystallized in a fleeting moment, standing still in a fraction of time otherwise perpetuated only beyond where they appear to stretch out.
Through this fleeting traveller of space, one can sense the intangible smile wished by Scolari: an expression in which the boundaries between real and imaginary ceases to be immediately perceptible. Like the ideograph or symbol, this sculpture, with an interlocutory feature, invites to a continuous staring, induces to the obliquity of the look and, in trying to decipher it, there is nothing left to do but travel the route through the complex conceptual game enacted by the author.
The general process – explains Scolari – stands like a production of pieces for a painting
The Aliante stirs memories of visionary and mythological images, which the winged representation has always been associated with. We prefer express the ancient aspiration of flying , as expression of things in their essence: in fact, wings mean, first of all, faculty of knowledge and, not by chance, the artwork, for those who comprehend, has wings.
In “Il pilota del labirinto” (the pilot of the labyrinth), the risk that the intellectual adventure involves, emerges when the spirit tries to penetrate the profound meaning of the creation of a myth. Aliante opens a glimmer over a world of myths, rites and symbols from which architecture draws its reason.
The profound meanings of the past architectural culture are recreated and studied until becoming a subject representing the Aliante. The Aliante wing takes shapes and and has, with the Arch section (Triennale of Milano 1986), a mutual constructive matrix based on the idea of mastaba, from which the proposition of the irregular winged rhythm originates.
– Scolari points out – It is about two identical architectural elements taken from the Arch oblique architecture, reunited without changing their individual meaning.
Therefore, the Aliante brings with it a strong attraction to architecture, in the profile of its own wings, the memory of these archetypes of constructions.
The construction
As Portoghesi observes about Scolari and paraphrasing Michelangelo, he does not give up having the same patterns in his eyes and, in that sense, the assonance detected at the time of static testing between the proportions attributed to the Aliante by Scolari and its structural dimensioning is meaningful.
The passage from conception to construction has surely posed problems, different from the usual paradigms of building production, yards and construction. First of all, the scaling presents a first not easy equation: to transfer the drawing proportions to reality, that is, the development of the almost 30 metres wing span. The other immediate difficulty, once fine tuned the Aliante structure, concerns the “stability”: one thing is equilibrium among the parts and its non-deformability and another is equilibrium with the environment.
Wind problem is a determining factor, exactly for its exposed broad wing span, stressed in the most unpredictable manner. The place, the foundations of the Arsenal, could not in any form or shape be tampered with. Especially, it was not possible anchoring it with tensioners or depth poles. In addition and based on experiences, the load admissible on the delicate paving of trachite, often resting on empty spaces caused by the wash-away, could not exceed two, maybe three hectograms per cm².
Therefore, it was necessary on one hand to enlarge the supporting base to alleviate the compression stresses, but on the other, weigh-down, meaning ballasting the base, in order to anchor the Aliante to the ground.
For that purpose an easy to assemble steel modular 7x7 plate has been prearranged. Every “module” has then been filled with sand. The weight of the Aliante has been shifted to the plate through three bearing points, which have allowed for the camber, thus allowing for a stereo-dynamic vision.
In order not to interrupt pedestrians access to the foundations and, above all the passage of boats, the pre-assembly yard has been set-up in a rear position. The final positioning has been accomplished through hoisting of the structurally completed work through an extremely calibrated manoeuvre, utilising only one crane, favoured by the perfect symmetry of the Aliante and its actual lightness allowed by the structure in laminated wood.
Assembling operations have taken eighteen working days by a team of four carpenters, of which Mr. Giacomo Sgabuzzi was the team leader and coordinator. Various were the yard problems encountered due to its positioning in S.Marta. The Aliante, dissembled after the Biennale, has been finally positioned on the cover of the S. Marta schoolrooms toward the Giudecca island channel. The plate has been anchored to the perimetric walls and replacing the ballasts with the weight-mass of the building itself.