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Salt, plays a key role in life as a mineral essential in the daily bases and as a metaphor it has more than one simplistic meaning. During the genesis, Lot’s wife became a pillar of salt for disobeying God. During the Roman times, once the roman empire has conquest a piece of land, if the enemy refused to serve Rome, the entire land would have been covered by salt to deny the grow of future crops. The Link between the site, which is the Graveyard and once was a prison of Venice, is harshly represented to death I grew up in Venice and walking trough the narrow streets seems inevitable to not notice the erosion by the salt on the walls, parts of the wall are covered by a thin white layer of salt. Because of the global warming the level of salinity in the water is due to increase and the problem of the erosion is crucial for the future of the city. The filtration of salt inside the brick make it increase it size by up to 25 times and the brick in return becomes weaker, so filtration of water accurse in the foundation and drags out the indispensible clay needed for the building to stand. So my intention was to provide clean water for the island of S. Michele extracting and filtering the water from the lagoon. To do so, they will need a small scale of desalination plant, capable of extracting the salt from the water, so that the waste material will be salt casted, which can have many uses for the island. My building is not a simple desalination plant but a factory of Salt works such as; coffins, graves and pieces of wall made entirely from casted salt - basically everything needed for the island to run. What inspired my design is the Magazzini del Sale, an industrial building from the Serenissima. The main component is the timber structure running horizontally trough the building, so it creates a big efficient space to be used for many purpose. The layout of my building is simple; it is built around the chain production of salt, to be more efficient and to move the crafts products easily. Even one of the stairs wraps around the chimney, which is one of the key components in my production, so I decided to emphasize the industrial elements so that they can be integrated completely into the design. Also, the dying area is situated on top of a terrace and the tanks remember its design pattern drawn underneath. In fact, in my design stage, my biggest intension was to maintain the two existing walls, with the ossuary, and add a third one in the middle made by the final product - an insulation layer of casted salt.The wall is not just an allegory but the casting salt has a temporary insulation property for low cost and low environmental impact. This project, within the city of Venice, is using the problem they face to provide autonomy in S. Michele and to denounce the real problem to the prominence, that in fact we don’t have much time left to resolve this issue
