Those who have had the good fortune, or rather the privilege, of living in the same building as their parents or grandparents may at some point in life – and if the building is old enough – want to know more, want to understand “as it was once”, to want access to missing parts of their own history, when they were too young to understand or remember. If you are lucky, you can get something from someone who is still there or you can find photos and letters that can speak: you immerse yourself in the past and memories and then return to the present. If you are lucky, but from your past you also want to build something, then everything acquires a different dimension: past and present are no longer two distinct times but merge together, allowing you to lay the foundations for something that speaks to the future.

On the border between the territory of Venice and that of Martellago, in what was once a natural and rural environment designed by the river Marzenego, there were 21 mills.

They were part of a network of buildings and environmental works, as well as reclamation, through which the Republic of Venice guaranteed the protection of the northern lagoon and the delicate balance between water and land. This balance also included the milling activity, as part of a more articulated and complex system that saw agriculture dialogue with land management, economy, architecture and social relations. Each mill, and with it all the buildings and structures used in the conservation of cereals – the granaries – and their cultivation, was not a single element but part of a system.

Today we would talk about interdisciplinarity or organization, once it was the most natural way of thinking.

One of these mills was part of a larger complex, called Ca’ Bianca, which included a house, a stable and a barn and which was owned by the Benedictine nuns of Sant’Eufemia. The years are those at the end of 1000, 1085, to be precise. In the following centuries, the mill changed its owners, passing from clergy to the state, to different families of landowners. The Ca’ Bianca complex also included another building, which was used as a dwelling, stable and barn and of which we have more detailed information already in the first half of the 19th century. Who today is lucky enough to live here, in the same walls where once lived grandparents and great- grandparents, has not limited himself to receive a house as an inheritance, but has imagined giving this house, or rather the granary of this house, a different role, one that would go in the same direction as the Republic of Venice. Looking at modernity. The project is called Habitat 3650 Workshop, and was born from an idea of Endrius Rocco and Pamela Colorio, two architects, who in 2011 created Habitat 3650, a pilot project for environmental redevelopment that now includes an organic farm, a vineyard, a sustainable building used as tourist accommodation and much more.

Listening to Endrius and Pamela, seeing them move in the spaces until a few months ago only imagined, makes you understand how – when they thought of their barn – the will was to create a place able to tell something, where they can share ideas and relationships. A project that others would not have started, but that for Endrius and Pamela is dense of meaning, that looks like them deeply and that tells what in time they became and what they want to build. Not alone, but working together. They imagined Habitat 3650 Workshop as a place where they can share the same principles and ideas behind Habitat 3650, the “mother house” whose name contains the incipit from which they started, a name that holds everything together, where every diversity is part of a whole, with an overall result that is better and stronger than the sum of its parts.It comes to mind what Hildegard of Bingen said, that is: “The whole nature is available to humanity.

We must work together with her. Because without it we cannot survive”. The idea of interdisciplinary work, between nature and man and between different subjects is exactly what made Habitat 3650 and which represents its development objective

Just as for Habitat 3650, Endrius and Pamela worked with nature, in the same way they imagined that the barn could become a space to do, a place to be among others and with others, to grow together. Habitat 3650 Workshop is therefore a small project – the result of a long work of redevelopment – that wants to be a “workshop”, just like those renaissance ones, in which to work on the projects of Habitat 3650, a place where to host small cultural and gastronomic events, where to do environmental education through workshops, where to put into practice sustainability, the exploitation of rural heritage, where to give life to a slow and responsible tourism.

Italo Calvino wondered “How to determine the exact moment when a story begins? Everything has always started before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book”.

The Workshop, in short, is the first line of a new novel, but much has already happened outside, in Habitat 3650.

Caterina Vianello