Restoration of the Procuratie Vecchie by David Chipperfield

DATE

05.11.2025

As every year, the students of the MArch Advanced program in Architecture, Design and Business Administration visited David Chipperfield’s project at the Procuratie Vecchie, located in St. Mark’s Square in Venice.

This project represents one of the most delicate and significant interventions of his career. Completed in 2022 after a long restoration process, it involved the comprehensive rehabilitation of this emblematic 16th-century building, which had remained closed to the public for centuries. The intervention restored the site’s historical and architectural value, adapting it to contemporary needs without altering its essence.

The commission, promoted by Generali Group, aimed to transform the Procuratie Vecchie into the new headquarters of The Human Safety Net, a social initiative of the company that supports vulnerable communities. Chipperfield approached the project with a deep respect for the history of the place, opting for a quiet architecture that reveals the layers of time rather than erasing them. His intervention is based on precision, craftsmanship, and a balance between the old and the new, subtly integrating the necessary structural and functional systems.

The architect reorganized the interior spaces to recover the coherence of the building, which had been fragmented by previous interventions. The original rhythm of circulations was reintroduced, vaults, floors, and woodwork were restored, and traditional Venetian materials such as marmorino and terrazzo were used, crafted with local techniques. The new elements — stairs, walkways, furniture — were designed with sobriety to reinforce spatial continuity, allowing visitors to perceive the building’s history without sensing a rupture between past and present.

In this edition, the students enjoyed a guided tour through the restoration of the Procuratie Vecchie — an intervention that not only returns one of its most emblematic buildings to Venice but also invites reflection on how to work with heritage in the 21st century. The project demonstrates that contemporaneity is not always expressed through new form, but also through precision and care in the use of time and material. In Chipperfield’s work, architecture becomes an exercise in restraint and respect, where beauty emerges from attention to the essential and the ability to give new life to what already exists.