House of the Three Oci for sale? No: hypothesis never considered, specious discussion

The Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice, an early 20th-century Venetian architectural jewel and one of the most important national exhibition centers for photography, will not be sold: the hypothesis had begun to circulate after, at a board meeting of the Venice Foundation (which manages the House), one of the board members, Tommaso Santini, listed a number of hypotheses for the financial recovery of the Foundation itself (which suffers from a 6.9 million euro deficit stemming from the M9 Museum, the digital museum in Mestre that opened in 2018).

However, the Foundation intervened with a note to dryly dismiss the sale hypothesis and thus dampen it, explaining what happened. Santini’s was but one of the operational hypotheses: the engineer, the Foundation explains, had been entrusted with the analysis of the Real Estate, and the same presented, as he had been asked, a report aimed at the “valorization” of the same, with a particular focus on the M9 real estate complex. “The purpose,” the Foundation let it be known, “was and remains that of giving analytical support to enable the Foundation’s Bodies to define the most appropriate actions to make the management of the same patrimony more efficient with the aim of valorizing it, taking into account not only the economic aspects but also the contribution, in cultural terms, that the Foundation gives and wants to continue to give to the entire territory.”

That’s not all: Santini’s dossier, the Foundation explains, “nowhere does it speak of sale but only and exclusively of ’valorization’ and, exclusively for this purpose, it also determines the market values of the properties, but, precisely, only and as a necessary starting point to allow us to make the most appropriate choices for valorization, both economic but, with explicit references to that effect, also cultural.” The hypothesis of selling Casa dei Tre Oci, the Foundation further points out, has never been taken into consideration, nor has it ever been received by the institution’s General Council, the body responsible for deliberating on any sales of real estate assets.

Finally, the president of the Venice Foundation, Giampietro Brunello, wanted to point out that “the discussion that has been triggered is specious, without foundation and, unfortunately, unnecessarily damaging for the Foundation, also because it is based on a hypothesis that does not exist, since the engineer Tommaso Santini had been given a limited assignment to the valorization of the real estate assets and that a proposal of sale was never made to the General Council.”

Pictured: the House of the Three Oci. Ph. Credit Till Niermann

House of the Three Oci for sale? No: hypothesis never considered, specious discussion

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