Place: Venice, Lido di Venezia, Lungomare Guglielmo Marconi
Author: Giancarlo De Carlo
Chronology: 1995 | 2002
Itinerary: Italy goes on vacation
Use: Beach facility
The crossing between the grand boulevard of Santa Maria Elisabetta and the seafront is a strategic place for the inhabitants of the Lido, in Venice: it hosted an ancient beach facility until the end of World War II, when it was destroyed by the Germans. Subsequently, a new beach facility called “Blue Moon” was built in the same area, but it was demolished at the end of the eighties because it was strongly deteriorated. In 2002, the new “Blue Moon” was definitively designed by Giancarlo del Carlo. It consists of two buildings – the pavilion and the facility’s body– and an elevated walkway. The spatial sequence begins with the pavilion, surrounded by a garden that creates a filter zone between the road and the beach.
The pavilion has a circular plan of 24.76 meters and rises on two levels: the lower one is a covered square; the upper one is an open-air square bordered by a dome surrounded by a thin steel lattice structure. In the middle, a helical staircase surrounds an antenna that, reaching a height of 33.80 meters, creates a landmark clearly visible from every part of the Lido.
Between the pavilion and the beach there is the building that houses the cafe, the restaurant, and some shops. The cafe, located to the west, is covered by four hemispherical domes; the restaurant, which occupies the building’s eastern section, is lit by a pyramid-shaped skylight. A porticoed window defines the front towards the sea.
A long metal pier suspended at the same height as the pavilion’s second level crosses the beach and reaches seaward.
Concrete and Istrian stone steps surround the building and link the path’s different levels with the Lido beach.