Synopsis
Venice was born as a place of refuge from a wave of killing and destruction that swept the region in the 5th and 6th centuries, its separateness from the surrounding land mass affording sanctuary to those fleeing violence and persecution. Over the centuries, partly as a result of carefully crafted story telling around the legend of St Mark and the acquisition of the saint’s and a host of other relics, Venice gained growing supremacy in the Mediterranean, developing from a heterotopic refuge into a geopolitical heterotopia able to thrive free of external influence and taking on an almost mythical aura in the eyes of the world, as the heir to an ancient Mediterranean mythology. This status as a geopolitical heterotopia allowed it, among other things, to become a sanctuary for alternative, forward-looking thinkers.
The city’s status as a geopolitical heterotopia was brought to an abrupt end by Napoleon in the early 1800s, and it became what Michel Foucault would call a ‘heterochronic space’ – a heterotopia set apart from ordinary time; a ‘museum’ city. As such, modern-day Venice may be seen as something of a relic of its glorious past; a city where time has been suspended, and one that no longer caters to the needs of its own inhabitants and is forced to rely for its survival on the myth that it built for itself; a city that retains the magnificence of its past but has lost control over its own destiny.
In response to this situation, this thesis explores the concepts of the sacred, sanctuary, relics and their ‘emanations’, designing with nature, the use of new biotechnologies and the ethics thereof, hybridity and posthumanism and postsecularism, in an attempt to weave together a narrative for 21st-century Venice, for the Athropocene era, that draws on Venice’s glorious past as a geopolitical heterotopia and a place of sanctuary.
It takes an indirect route towards this, by positing the neighbouring island of San Lazzaro, with its congregation of Mekhitarist Armenian monks who devote their lives to research and the quest for knowledge, as a microcosm of pre-modern Venice. The island’s extra-territorial status offers blurred legal boundaries and thus provides a possible basis for a geopolitical heterotopia in which to engage in advanced biotechnological research in a manner that goes against current trends and keeps faith with the utopian ideal of the good of humankind. As Venice was once a haven for alternative thinkers, so San Lazzaro will become a sanctuary for innovative, challenging research into, and testing of, new biotechnologies, set apart from the commercial pressures of modern life.
San Lazzaro degli Armeni, which stands in the lagoon to the south-east of the island of Venice, is home to one of the most important Armenian religious communities outside Armenia. The island’s Mekhitarist community, which takes it name from the founding monk, Mkhitar Sebastatsi, who sought refuge on the island in 1715 after fleeing the persecution of the Ottomans in Morea, today numbers some 20 monks and seminarians. Over the centuries, the island has become one of the world’s foremost centres for Armenian culture and studies. Taking its cue from the hybridity inherent in the work of Zurr and Catts on semi-living entities and in the posthumanist and postsecularist ideas of Carissa Turner Smith, which seek to mediate binaries between concepts including religion and science and the sacred and the secular, the project redefines the role of the monks of San Lazzaro, extending their activities beyond the purely academic field to include research into new living organisms, thus taking them into unfamiliar territory and challenging current notions regarding religious belief and the sacred. The monks take on a hybrid role as researchers, nurturers and spiritual and ethical guides, to enhance knowledge of, and create a new system of ethics for, the new life forms created by the ground-breaking technologies brought to bear.
Architecturally, the same hybridity is apparent, with the project relying in part on ‘grown’ structures that are in keeping with the desire to ‘design with nature’ expressed by Estévez et al. in response to the environmental issues thrown up by the Anthropocene era. The project offers up a new form of sacred architecture, both in terms of the use of these ‘grown’ structures, which, as semi-living entities, may be viewed as inherently sacred, and in terms of the new laboratories and the supporting programmes, as the sacred is ‘immanent and deeply embedded’ in them because their purpose is the in vitro creation of new life forms and because they espouse the heterogeneity that is a defining feature of the sacred.
The interventions, which take place at four separate locations around the island, focus on two main structures: a genetic-engineering laboratory and a tissue-engineering laboratory. The purpose of the other structures is to support these two activities and ancillary research with possible spin-offs, including for a sustainable ‘grown’ architecture of the future. The laboratories will be used for medical purposes, focusing on the research and development of plant-based vaccines and the creation of human organs for transplant, on a donation-only basis. The semi-living and second-nature entities created will be treated as modern-day relics for the Anthropocene era.
Relics, a physical embodiment of the sacred, are a foundational concept in this project, informing both the conceptual approach and the search for a sacred architecture for the Anthropocene era. In the words of Helen Hills, relics ‘are never housed and never contained’ but ‘are always excessive, overflowing, spilling out’, and it is precisely this radiant power that the project seeks to harness, taking its cue from pre-modern Venice, in order to give the San Lazzaro interventions a similar catalytic effect on the city to that which the relic of St Mark had all those centuries ago; borrowing from the past to set out a project grounded in forward-looking technologies and thinking whose effects will spill out over the lagoon and offer a viable future to a city that once held the reins of its own destiny firmly in its grasp but today has little option other than to rely on the magnificent remains of its glorious past.