Venice is a city built of bricks and one enriched by the wooden cargo ships that helped lift the former Venetian Republic to greatness. So it’s fitting that last May at the 2016 Venice Biennale, a handful of architecture and engineering students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and several European schools joined a team of professionals to build an experimental brick structure in the courtyard of the historic Arsenale, where naval and trading vessels were once constructed. Under the guidance of Foster + Partners architects, the team tested new approaches to traditional brick. Lord Norman Foster, known for his groundbreaking works in steel and glass, developed the design for the graceful, thin-shell masonry vault, demonstrating that common brick, with its durability, relatively low cost, and almost universal availability, continues to inspire form and innovation.
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