Nigel Coates is perhaps architecture’s most poetic provocateur. His career is strewn with theatrical interiors, speculative cities and spaces where iconoclastic imagination intertwines with function. With Margherissima, a Director’s Special Project for the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Coates turns his gaze across the lagoon to the much overlooked Venetian docklands of Marghera. Installed inside the Polveriera Austriaca at Forte Marghera, the project transforms a contaminated parcel of land known as I Pili into a model for a new kind of neighbourhood. It resists visions of gentrified utopia and urban decay, presenting not a blueprint for development but a provocation for reimagining the city.

Marghera was developed on the western marshlands of the Venetian Lagoon in the early 20th century to accommodate container shipping. Heavily bombed during the Second World War, it presents a landscape of industry and entropy, a messy patchwork of refineries, warehouses and poisoned soil, almost always just out of view for Venice’s many visitors, even if on clear days you can see the smoke from its chimneys from the western edges of the islands. If Venice takes the shape of a pair of hands clasped in prayer, Marghera might be the city’s armpit.

Margherissima – realised by Coates’ studio in collaboration with the speculative design collective (ab)Normal and a cadre of Architectural
Association (AA) students – crystallised slowly over a year of crits, workshops and discussion, captured by sketches in Coates’ notebooks. An initial framework and the final model came together in the idyllic studios of Grymsdyke Farm, a place of material magic run by Guan Lee, one of the project’s many collaborators. There, in dappled spring sunlight, the team’s ideas were rendered physical – 3D-printed and hand-painted houses and interventions cast in clay and metal.

The project is a celebration of the AA itself: its experimental spirit and refusal of academic orthodoxy. For the Association’s director, Ingrid Schroder, Margherissima is “a view of a possible future created through the most astonishing and generous collaboration” of students, staff and alumni. Bringing together a wide-ranging team, including the director John Maybury, this project has come together passionately, conceptually and eccentrically.

What emerged from weeks of frenetic activity is less a scale model than a palimpsest of urban invention. There’s a metallic rendering in miniature of the now-shuttered Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido; a honeycomb series of houses with vongole-shaped balconies; an oval parking lot sculpted from clay; the designer Charles Jeffrey contributed a banana shaped boot, which towers over the model. In the distance is a Murano-glass rendition of Venice itself, sealed under a glass cloche like a reliquary.

The project is a celebration of the AA itself: its experimental spirit and refusal of academic orthodoxy

The city under the dome is a nod by Coates to the late, great Mike Kelley’s glass-encased sculptures of Kandor – Superman’s lost hometown, frozen in time and space, a snow globe of memory and longing. In Margherissima, Venice itself becomes such a fragment – its mythical beauty distorted, refracted, and made strange, even as it is fixed and preserved under glass. Marghera is not a problem to solve, but a small canvas within the city to reimagine the whole.

“This is a model in both senses of the word: a template for places under threat from rising sea levels and a giant model of Marghera as a social battery for the Lagoon,” says Coates. “Could Marghera be a beacon for cities around the world, especially those in danger of being consumed by their own success?”

In reaching out to the post-industrial edges of Venice, and imagining a surreal, hopeful community amid its ruins, beyond the stifling histories of the city’s touristic centre, Coates has turned the city inside out, and made it new again. .