Students explore the distinctive land-water urban edges of Venice and the Veneto
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During the fall 2025 semester, seventeen graduate and undergraduate students from the departments of architecture and landscape architecture followed in the footsteps of alumni spanning the past five decades who have participated in study abroad programs in the Veneto region.
The Veneto programs, launched 50 years ago by the School of Architecture, have sustained ongoing investigation into this distinctive built environment: a place characterized by transformative human-built hydrological conditions and defining land-water urban boundaries.
Led by professors Erin Putalik (Architecture and Landscape Architecture) and William Sherman (Architecture), students participated in an advanced research studio titled “Venice and the Veneto — Building through Time,” and complementary seminars “AFIELD: Encountering/Documenting Site and Process” and “Building Venice.” Together, the courses, along with others, offered students an opportunity to carefully study historical and extant conditions of a place — and how these features at the edges of land and water provide a way of understanding how to design this landscape, incrementally through time, in a climate-changing world.
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“Through the study abroad, students learned to interrogate how we come to know sites, landscapes, and places of all scales — and how our methods of researching, documenting, or otherwise coming to know them from afar, verses from within, impacts our understanding of these places,” said Putalik. “By experiencing Venice and the Veneto first-hand, and also researching in Virginia, our approach to designing is enriched by a layered understanding of place.”
The Alluvial Plain and The Lagoon: Negotiations with Water
The fall 2025 studio included a unique format of seven weeks studying in Italy, ‘on-site,’ bookended by classes in Charlottesville. The focus of the studio was the study and strategic transformation of moments along the land-water boundary in Venice and Torcello, two islands in the Venice Lagoon, as well as in several river-cities within the Veneto.
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In the alluvial plain that covers much of the Veneto and originates in the Alto-Adige, the land is characterized by a vast network of canals for the transport of people and goods; redirected, rectified, channelized, and dammed rivers; and endless arrays of irrigation ditches, embankments, and drainage channels. A millennium of the management of water and sediment has slowly shaped this landscape. (1)
In ways both similar and distinct from the alluvial regions of the Veneto, the Venice Lagoon is also a highly and particularly designed environment, masquerading as a collection of natural features. From the shaping of the islands within the lagoon to the transformation of the barrier island system of the Lido into a territorial scale risk-management device, the form and dynamics of the lagoon, its islands, its wetlands, and its bathymetry both record a history of how this region has been used. (2)
Through the analysis of these conditions, students were asked:
How does a city’s relationship to water change through time, and how can we use this rich history of urbanization and urban development as a way to understand built negotiations with water?
The Landing Point: Connecting an Island to an Urban Network
The studio’s main project focused on a site on the island of Torcello, often called the “mother of Venice” as it is home of the first settlement in the Venetian Lagoon — settled by refugees fleeing mainland invasions in 452 AD. Today, the island is a mix of wetlands and agriculture, marked by a basilica dating from the 7th century, a church from the 14th century and a small number of homes.
Students examined the landing point of Torcello, where visitors first experience the island, which is accessible by ferry from Venice. This point is defined through the studio as “a city fragment that connects the island to the urban network of the lagoon” — a site that serves as a transition from the crowded streets of central Venice to the sparsely populated island.
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Prompted by the dynamics of time, students proposed design interventions that considered the daily patterns of a land-water landscape: the tides, the cycles of the sun, the moon, and the seasons. Extended timeframes of centuries and millennia that have long shaped the island’s built environment, its materiality and its form, provided insights for students as they considered their approach to inhabiting the water’s edge.
The following studio projects present three distinct approaches to this site: explorations into the spatial and environmental relationship between people, land, water, and built form over time. To compliment the presentations of the design proposals are the students’ reflections of their time spent studying abroad in this unique and inspiring region of the world.
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Torcello Landing
Alex Heald (MLA ’26) and Ruth Shatkay (MLA ’26)
Project Summary
Deeply inspired by the low-lying yet highly-varied ground of the Venetian lagoon — spanning urban, agricultural, ecological, and infrastructural interventions operating in unusually close proximity and intensity — our design draws on local landscape forms and processes and aims to concentrate and enliven them at the site of Torcello’s vaporetto landing. Our hope is that the visitor to Torcello may enjoy and discover resonances with the broader landscape of the lagoon, seeing anew its long history of intense, layered work and density of richly varied conditions. This design approach is informed by an interpretation of the enclosed garden as a place that makes manifest “the historical, functional, and spatial complexities of the landscape” (Aben and de Wit). Here, precisely lifted and sunken ground, contained water, tidal fluxes, structured shade, spongy soil, fruits, and a celebration of agricultural forms and species come together to orient and welcome one to Torcello, grounding one within the life of the lagoon.
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On Venice by Alex
There’s an obvious energy and thrill to the organic nature of Venice, with its lack of straight lines and regularity. But as much as a Venetian campo can be fruitfully studied as a lively public space thanks in part to these qualities, as a designer it’s tricky to know what exactly to take from this aspect that could be applicable elsewhere; Venice’s forms clearly cannot be replicated one-to-one.
Thus, after a semester studying in Venice I have active questions around what happens when different eras of construction mingle, when a place is not built all at once but instead accumulates in small, responsive pieces over time.
Is there room for an ethos of additive — even authorless — remaking (that’s different from undoing, tearing out) which can facilitate, in time, a certain liveliness of urban space?
On Studying Abroad by Alex
From Charlottesville, the study of Venice’s water edges naturally took on a typologizing bent (what edge profiles exist where, for instance), while on the ground my interest grew in watching and documenting the business and movement of people occupying space. We could see that public and social spaces were visibly enlivened by the organic texture of Venice’s urban frames — its countless passages, sudden openings, corners out of alignment, bends out of sight.
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Ripples: Framing Fluidity
Rena Maier (BSArch ’26)
Project Summary
This project is simultaneous architecture, landscape, installation, and art in the form of a series of constructed moments along a path. At the edge of Torcello, an island in the Venetian lagoon, tourists, locals, and visitors are invited to pause and connect with their landscape and context. Water is used to frame the movements and actions of ecological actors: the sun above, the moon below, and wind on the line in between. Stepping stones, curtains, bridges, bathrooms, and coffee are aligned to produce a patchwork of movement and pause prompting meditation and reflection as you see, feel, taste, and touch the world around you.
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On Site by Rena
During our time abroad, we studied various cities in addition to Venice and their physical and social relationships with their respective waterways.
We completed a series of sketching and observation exercises focused on pausing and measuring. Through these exercises, I felt a deeper connection to the places and landscapes we studied.
I wanted my project to prompt a similar feeling of knowledge and connection that can come from taking time to listen to what a site is trying to teach you.
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On Studying Abroad by Rena
Our group of undergraduates and graduates got along very well, and we frequently ate meals and played cards with one another. However, one of the most memorable moments from our time in Venice was Halloween. Spending the evening together while dressed up in Venetian masks and getting to experience the holiday in such a unique setting was magical.
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The Legibility of the Line
Hetvee Panchal (MLA ’26)
Project Summary
Theresa Moller says, “You put the line in the middle of all this wildness, and all the wildness becomes more aware of the line, and the line of the wildness.” This project is about lines – those that emerge through planted form, and those momentarily drawn through it.
This project does not attempt to resolve this tension but instead inhabits it. Torcello is read not as a singular monument anchored by the cathedral, but as a planted landscape where histories, futures, and daily life meet through vegetation. Formal spatial orders derived from the Veneto and the Italian garden tradition are understood to already exist within the site in latent, fragmentary form.
Rather than introducing new planting expressions, the project incrementally edits, cuts, and amplifies existing vegetative structures to reconcile the intentional and the emergent. By ‘returning’ to planted forms that once existed, Torcello asserts its place as the ‘origin’ of the Veneto. A place where order peeks through disorder, and where wildness sharpens the legibility of the line.
Through a series of incremental moves, potential is found within emergent site conditions to create occupyable moments that invite lingering and presence.
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On the Italian Landscape by Hetvee
Design often becomes a tool of delineation: between the world we inhabit and the world we intrude upon. Between the tamed and the wild; the formal and the informal; the geometrical and the amorphous. These distinctions structure both discourse and practice, yet there is some struggle to account for landscapes that exist between these categories. In the deep history of Italian landscapes, these binaries are heightened. Villa gardens assert straight lines and sharp edges against fields and forests on rising hillsides.
Venice’s fundamental urban structure is an intermingling of the contingent and the emergent: the marsh as contingent ground, and the archipelago as a form continuously shaped through adaptation, accumulation, and use.
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On Studying Abroad by Hetvee
It was an incredibly freeing experience to inhabit the region over an extended period without the pressure of producing a polished outcome. There was so much freedom to attune myself to the many elements of the Veneto and to really explore it as integral to my design journey. I think part of it was that much of the semester was just recording and drawing, without expectation of immediate resolution or translation into a final product that fundamentally changed how I learned to see.
Studio Faculty: Assistant Professor Erin Putalik (Architecture and Landscape Architecture), Mario di Valmarana Professor (Architecture) and Director of the Valmarana Center for Studies in Venice and the Veneto
Studio Participants: Madison Bell-Rosof (MArch), Aileen Frazier (MLA), Alexandria Gibson (MArch), Alexander Heald (MLA), Leonie Herrmann (BSArch), Patrick Lins (BSArch), Grace Lunak (MArch), Lorena Maier (BSArch), Isabelle Martins (MArch), Hetvee Panchal (MLA), Emma Reed (MLA), McKeiran Romasser (BSArch), Elizabeth Schmidt (BSArch), Clara-Marie Schwaerzler (MArch), Ruth Shatkay (MLA), Riley Strand (MArch), Leopold Wehner (MArch)
Reference (1) and (2): ARCH 4010/ALAR 8010 Research Studio, Fall 2025, Venice and the Veneto — Building through Time (Putalik and Sherman)
