Abstract
The project for a new hospital to be built in the Cannaregio district of Venice is one of the last to be studied by Le Corbusier, in collaboration with the young Guillermo Jullian de la Fuente. It can be interpreted in terms of the intertext that links it to Le Corbusier's observations of Venice from his research at the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris in 1915 and during his travels there, and in terms of its relationship to earlier projects, such as that for the Cité universitaire in 1925. The combination of full and empty spaces, echoing the urban morphology of Venice, is also a variant of the hypothesis studied shortly before for the Olivetti computer center in Rho, and an echo of proposals by younger architects such as Candilis, Josic and Woods or Piet Blom. It is not in its autonomy, then, that this complex form finds its meaning, but rather in the matrix of its relationships with a considerable number of other proposals.
