Design philosophy and principles

Designing “theatrical machinery” involves building a mechanism made up of countless people and devices which, when they work together, project human sentiments. Their celebration can become ecstasy or madness, creating legends and taking us across the threshold of perception.
Creating theatrical machinery is linked inherently to the image of the theatre and stage during a performance, when a single note sung by an opera singer has the power to move the audience, when sensations become spine-tingling. This moment is the end result of the whole design: an ensemble of material actions which, during a performance, verge on the divine and cross the abyss inside our souls.

Designing the theatre “as and where it stood” brings us immediately to La Fenice's relationship with the city of Venice and its social and urban setting, hovering between Palladian monumentalism and Sansovino's architectural integration, evoking Selva's aim to give the theatre the utmost urban dignity: “for those arriving by that road, taking the last arch in San Giminiano delle Procuratie Vecchie as a reference point, it will be the nearest Theatre to the Square”.
In the open museum that is Venice, the theatre appears once again in its timeless image, and the rigidity of restoration mirrors images of the Family portrait with interior, witness to the never-ending passage of generation to generation.

The scenery and setting become make-believe, and the reconstruction and its colours bring to mind the atmosphere of a 19th-century theatre; a shade of red as Strehler would have known it, or a pinky-orange shrouded in velvet. The colours and decorations conjure up the vivid sensations of opera which have kept pace with technology over the centuries, embellishing the theatre's repertoire with names such as Wagner, Mascagni and Puccini, last of all Verdi and his Othello and Falstaff, replacing the aquamarine colouring which characterised the theatre in the 1700s.

Project report