He seemed to be the only competitor and he was supported by the mayor Massimo Cacciari, but on September 20th, at the deadline of the call for tender for the administration of the Punta in Dogana, François Pinault, the new director of Palazzo Grassi, found a big competitor: the Solomom R. Guggenheim Foundation. What for Pinault should have been just a piece of cake, in the end revealed itself as an uphill path. The Solomom R. Guggenheim Foundation, at the head of a cartel to which belong also the Veneto Region, promoting the initiative, and the financier Alberto Rigotti, Managing Director of Munus s.p.a. affiliated of the bank ABM Merchant, is indeed a respected rival. He has been present on the territory for many years thanks to the presence in the lagoon of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the quality of its collections.

To decide the result of the game might be the two rival architects and their projects, and here comes the unexpected: the Guggenheim Foundation “dismisses” the architect Vittorio Gregotti , to whom had already been given a project of restoration of the same building, and presents an international celebrity, the architect of Iraqi origins Zaha Hadid. That is to say the opposite of the minimalist style of Tadao Ando, Pinault’s trustworthy architect, author of the recent restoration of Palazzo Grassi. Zaha Hadid, on the other hand, belongs to the other school, the one of the strong sign that is visible on the surroundings and may even change it radically. But this is not the case, they claim from the Guggenheim Collection. And, to justify this crushing u-turn, they add that the spaces have changed: Gregotti’s project involved the whole building, whilst in the call for tender they talk about an intervention on 3,000 square metres, that is to say only on the state land (granted to the Venice city council for 99 years) and not also on the (about) 1500 sqm owned by the Patriarchate of Venice. A huge difference indeed. The price of the intervention has been evaluated to be around 20 and 30 million euros. Should Palazzo Grassi’s project win, then the work would be payed byPinault; otherwise the bigger expense would fall on the financier Rigotti, and the Guggenheim would place its collection at disposal of the Region, arranging the cultural agenda with them.

In the meantime, the commission in charge of this difficult sentence (composed of three functionaries, two from the city council and one from the state, and from three members of the Scientific committee, preseded by the well-known art critic Achille Bonito Oliva) has started the decision process and is willing to come to a conclusion by the end of October. It will thus be put and end to a complicated matter that went on for over twenty years, and that seemed to have been solved in 1999 with the assignation, from the at that time Minister for Cultural Goods Giovanna Melandri, of the Punta della Dogana to the Guggenheim Foundation. But doing so, nobody kept into account the fact that one third of the building was property of the Patriarchate of Venice. And when the winner will be announced, there will still be the problem of the restoration, because in the meanwhile Punta della Dogana has decayed more and more, also in the static part. A building which is currently not so attractive, and that hopefully will find a new, revitalizing function as a point of reference of contemporary art.