This project proposes a union building for gondoliers and gondola makers as an active local institution within the tourist-saturated and increasingly underused urban fabric of the Rialto Market. Historically, these two groups belonged to different cooperatives, yet they now face interconnected pressures produced by the changing role of the gondola in Venice.

Once embedded in the everyday movement of the city, the gondola has been displaced by cheaper and faster forms of transport, such as the vaporetto. At the same time, it has survived largely through tourism, becoming both an economic necessity and a staged spectacle within the city.

As an antithesis to the vaporetto stop, the building foregrounds Venice’s special relationship to water. Drawing on the experiential qualities of the gondola, woodworking traditions, and allegory, the project reclaims the gondola not as a passive tourist object, but as a living cultural and political instrument for local presence in the city.