Casa di Gardella alle Zattere
Casa di Gardella alle Zattere Historical Timeline
Last updated on September 5, 2026Origins
Officially known as the Cicogna Condominium after the family that commissioned it, the building replaced two badly deteriorated older houses on the same site, along the Fondamenta delle Zattere facing the Giudecca Canal, bordering the church of Spirito Santo.
Turning points
Gardella's building arrived just a few years after one of Venice's most notorious architectural controversies. In 1953, the city's building commission had rejected a design by Frank Lloyd Wright for a student residence on the Grand Canal, the Masieri Memorial, on the grounds that its modern design would clash with the surrounding historic fabric. Gardella's Casa alle Zattere, completed in 1962, became the counter-example: a genuinely modern building that Venice's own authorities and public accepted, by tuning its scale, materials, and irregular rhythm of windows and balconies to the city around it rather than imitating historic styles outright.
Influential people
Ignazio Gardella was already an established figure in Italian post-war architecture, and this building became one of his best-known works specifically because of how carefully it negotiated between modernism and its setting -- a very different problem from his contemporary Case Borsalino apartment blocks in Alessandria, built around the same years in an entirely different material and urban context.
Cultural evolution
The Casa alle Zattere has since become a standard reference point in architectural history courses and guides to 20th-century Venice, cited alongside the Wright rejection as one half of a well-known before-and-after story about how modern architecture could -- and couldn't -- be introduced into the historic city.
Present-day significance
The building remains a private residential condominium today, its apartments still in ordinary use rather than open to visitors, but its facade along the Zattere promenade is freely visible and remains a required stop for anyone tracing Venice's rare examples of successful 20th-century architecture.