Open Hand in Venice

Venice is the greatest of museum cities, and it guards its monuments jealously. In fact, the city has largely resisted new architecture ever since the fac,ade that closed the Piazza San Marco was built during Napoleonic days. Frank Lloyd Wright in 1953 tried to build a modest hanging-gardens-type palazzo on the Grand Canal, but civic fathers rejected the design as presumptuous. Now another brash suitor, France's Le Corbusier, has come to woo a place in the city that seems determined to sink into the sea unchanged.

"Corbu," of course, is remembered as the man who would have started improving Paris by demolishing its most historic part. But that was in 1922; the master is now 78 and mellowed. He has flattered his intended, asking, "Have you observed that Venice is gay and proud, never menaced, never shoved about, never disturbed?" Returning recently, he found Venice "a modern city made for man, without the oppression of machine civilization."

Sacred Silhouette. Such sweet some things, combined with Corbu's world wide reputation (TIME cover, May 5, 1961), inclined Venice's municipal hospital head to invite Corbu to replace the old hospital of Sts. John and Paul.

The only convenience that the Renaissance structure now has is its location just across the lagoon from the cemetery. But since it, like everything else, is a monument, the new $11 million hospital will rise elsewhere: in the slummish San Giobbe sector, where the city slaughterhouse stands, and also the gateway to the city. The available land is nearly 7 1/2 acres, but Corbu plans to extend the hospital for nearly five more acres across the water. Ironically, the man who first put modern buildings on stilts, or pilotis, as he calls them, now can put them to their most logical use. "The silhouette of Venice is sacred," declared Corbu as his model for the hospital was displayed in the city's Institute of Architecture. The roof height will nowhere exceed 50 ft., even where the hospital sits well clear of water on pilotis. Sandwiched between the sacred skyline and the sea is a series of enough multilevel pavilions, each caring for 50 patients, to make a 1,200-bed "machine for healing." The top floor is reserved for patients, sequestered in 10-ft. by 10-ft. rooms with skylights.

Job's Patience. Instantly critics snapped that the sick need a view. Corbu's partisans reply that the bedridden prefer a supine view of blue sky, birds and stars. All that the hospital must do to grow is go to sea, expanding, said the architect, "like an open hand." There is no fac,ade or front door: ambulance boats can dock conveniently under the hospital at gondola ports. As much an adaptation of the Swiss lake villages, which Swiss-born Corbu knows well, as a ducal palace or a gondola garage, the design should please Venetians. Yet, however harmonious this adventuring architecture, there is still much bureaucratic approval to survive. San Giobbe hospital refers, of course, to Job. And for the sick as well as for an architect wishing to build in Venice, Job's patience is an ideal.

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