Venetian dolce vita: Giancarlo De Carlo's new beach playground on Venice's Lido is a responsive and nourishing armature for many different kinds of public activities and pleasures

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2005 by Peter Blundell Jones

The Lido in Venice is a strip of land dividing the lagoon from the Adriatic, just a short vaporetto ride from St Mark's. You arrive at the quay on one side to meet a front of shops, cafes and fast-food places. Ten minutes' walk past stately turn-of-the-century villas and hotels brings you across to beach and sea, the calm of the lagoon exchanged for the lap of waves, a slightly curving swathe of brown sand facing a wide blue horizon. To avoid the stagnant pollution of the lagoon, this is where Venetians come to swim, to lie about on the beach and to have a good time. There are many hotels and private interests along the beach, but the central area terminating the axial road across the Lido has long been public, the site of an array of bathing cabins in the nineteenth century and of much else since.

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By 1999 it had reached a sorry and run-down state and a competition was held for a replacement. Giancarlo De Carlo won with a proposal for new facilities, borrowing the name Blue Moon from a nightclub that had existed on the site in the dolce vita era of the 1950s. Although practical and commercial facilities such as bars and cafes provided a basis for the quantitative programme, the more essential need was to accentuate the transition between land and sea, providing places to linger and to dwell, for private intimacy as well as public spectacles such as music, dancing and open-air film shows. This is accomplished by an arrangement more a landscape than a building, which plays in a complex way with section as well as plan.

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On the land side, the building announces itself through a 30m tower equipped with flag and viewing platform, a device to terminate the axis of the Viale Santa Maria Elisabeta which is the main drive across the Lido. The road makes a T-junction at the sea-front where De Carlo has carved out an exedra as entrance, roughly centred on the vehicle roundabout. From here, ramps and staircases lead on to a rotunda which provides a shady waiting area on the ground and a raised platform for dancing at the upper level, both centred on the tower. The dance platform is surmounted by an open dome in white-painted steel with a gently irregular structure, powerful as a definer of space without providing any weather protection whatsoever. It takes its place among other domes in Venice as the main architectural accent of the complex, and as the hub of activity at night when the beach is no longer the focus. Gardens on both sides provide a retreat from the glare and the music, allowing for more intimate moments. In the daytime, the ground floor of the rotunda is a small piazza, with a beach shop on the seaward side. The view of the sea is restricted to a narrow opening which leads past the bar and restaurant through to the beach, but there is also a generous flight of steps leading to the upper level. The beach end of the complex is treated like a huge amphitheatre, with the ground floor of the building dropping into the sand in contour-like steps, and seating terraces on the roof repeating the same act of embrace. The terraces of the building also continue to both sides in open ranks of seating, used casually in the daytime by people reading, picnicking or just lying around. Near the focus a wooden platform rises out of the sand to offer a potential bandstand, but the culminating event geometrically is a joint in the pier that marks the complex from the sea side as the tower does from the land. Carried on a steel frame, the timber clad pier emerges from the roof terrace of the main building axial with the steps from the rotunda, descending a gentle slope with the beach. At the focal point it changes direction, meeting a staircase up from the sand. It runs from there to meet the edge of the sea with a circular platform, and apparently there are plans to add an even longer arm stretching out across the water which will allow for diving and access to boats.

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Apart from being a staple of seaside architecture, the pier provides an anchor for the whole composition, and at the larger scale it belongs to a series of piers or jetties that punctuate the Lido, marking key points. On arriving at the Blue Moon, it is hard to resist the temptation to walk through to the end just to explore the view out and back, and it seems unsurprising that, with the disappointment that it only just reaches the water, a longer one is proposed. In the Venetian summer sun, the pier has a second use, for its shadow across the beach becomes a place of refuge, and the area beneath its terminal platform has also become a favourite place for young men to hang about.

The crescent of building between the rotunda and the beach is the only true interior, containing a bar and a restaurant both of which overlook the beach, with services along the back edge. The bar has intimate seating areas, top lit and covered with small mosaic-clad domes, while the restaurant has a level-change across the floor to allow beachward views for those at the back. On the level above is another world: a complex roofscape of paved terraces, with numerous places to sit and lie. The little domes over the bar make more intimate corners and the elevated landscape resembles a promenade around the alleys of an old hill town.