The Metropolitan City of Venice promoted the “Bosco dello Sport” (The Sports Forest) project, entrusting the general concept and masterplan design to Marazzi Architetti studio.
The aim of the project is to offer the community a new “place” intended not only for professional competitions but also for daily sports practice, the promotion of social inclusion, the awareness of environmental issues and the spreading of a culture of wellness and psychophysical well-being.
The intervention concerns an area of 115 hectares in the Tessera district, near the Marco Polo airport. The location is easily accessible thanks to both existing connections to the airport and those under constructions such as the new railroad and train station.
The landscape takes the center of the stage and pervades the area affected by the urban transformation, with 62.5 hectares of woodland, 16.5 hectares of equipped green spaces and about 60,000 new trees, half of which are high-trunk trees.
This generates a new green area connecting the Dese river with the Northern Lagoon. Architecture and infrastructure blend harmoniously with trees and nature with a planovolumetric project that recalls a DNA strand or a complex cellular system, in which each element contributes to the efficiency and life of the system itself.
The result is a fully equipped park, where professional sports, daily amateur practice, training, recreation, and entertainment coexist as intertwined elements. The structure is wrapped in a “natural skin” that pays homage to recurring elements of the lagoon area, such as reeds or the sequences of poles and “briccole” used for mooring gondolas and signaling waterways.
The vibrant and iconic structure of the covered arena, on the other hand, is inspired by glass windows – typical of Murano – that consist of disks of colored glass, assembled and bound together with metal profiles. This exterior cladding also recalls the noble tradition of Venetian palaces architecture, in which the façade and its reflections on the water balance and harmonize the relationship between the volumes and mass of the building with the urban and lagoon landscape.
After a technical, urban and administrative planning path of only 2 years, the Bosco dello Sport project has reached the executive phase: the first construction works have just started and will be completed by 2026, for an investment of 315 million euros, of which two thirds financed by the Venice Municipality’s own resources and one third by contribution of the Italian government. Source by Marazzi Architetti.