Casa d’Aqua – Venetian Maritime Museum & Water Ecology Research Centre Part 2 Project 2019 Kastytis Donauskis Ulster University | UK Casa d’Aqua – a Maritime Museum and Centre for Oceanic studies placed in Arsenale, Venice, introduces a new water route underneath an extruded palazzo with an inhabited wall.Evolving from an abstracted set of readings of the campo -as the fundamental DNA of Venice- the section of the building and the material and detail references such as to the 'hidden forest' that sustains the flotation of every building, act as spatial figures, already embedded in Venetian architecture, but now re-deployed in a layered sequence of spaces from which to explore views of the city, its history and the craft of its naval vessels.At the centre of the building on the public belvedere, which connects across the canale, is a flotilla of displayed historical vessels, the central one of which captures the high point of Venetian naval architecture. The recalled tracery of Venetian Palazzo screens act now as a structural idea and which cast shadows across this vessel like the triangulated early maps of the oceans to be explored by an expanding Venetian empire, while seen below this, under the hull, are the contemporary quotidian vessels, which pass through this new gateway on their daily journeys, in and out of Venice. Kastytis Donauskis Tutor(s)Mr Paul Clarke