Norman Foster & Porsche Unveil Venice E-Mobility Gateway
The Norman Foster Foundation and Porsche have unveiled ‘Gateway to Venice’s Waterway’, a 37-metre installation that tackles the city’s pressing transport challenges by championing sustainable e-mobility on land and water. The structure embodies the intersection of cutting-edge design and architecture while echoing Venice’s historic bridges, and it links visitors directly with new electric transport options such as Schiller water bikes and the Frauscher x Porsche 850 Fantom Air sports boat powered by the all-electric Porsche Macan Turbo drivetrain. During the opening week of Biennale Architettura 2025, this craft will provide emission-free mobility, while students from Style Porsche and Studio F. A. Porsche Zell am See will showcase further ideas for sustainable urban transport.
Michael Mauer, Vice President, Style Porsche, explains, ‘Porsche is and remains a brand characterised by a highly demanding field of tension between tradition and innovation. This means that we, as a design team, are constantly dealing with the question of how we can strategically shape the future of our brand in terms of identity and authenticity. The exchange with Lord Norman Foster and his team is a very valuable source of inspiration. It looks beyond the confines of pure vehicle design and gives us essential impulses for our brand's consistent, future-oriented direction.
Lord Norman Foster adds, ‘Dreaming awakens a sense of limitless possibilities and the courage to imagine what does not yet exist. It's about imagining bold solutions to seemingly insurmountable challenges. In this project, dreaming meant imagining a Venice where historic preservation and advanced mobility coexist. We have created a blueprint for urban innovation that respects the past while embracing the future.’
The installation launches a long-term venture between the Norman Foster Foundation and Porsche to explore the automobile’s future. Joint sketches on display outline a vision for individual mobility and form the cornerstone of the partnership’s next phase.
Responding to the Biennale theme ‘Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collectively, the piece blends dreams with reality through nature-inspired technology. Lightweight aluminium, recycled materials, and energy-efficient systems—echoing the Porsche 917’s lattice frame—deliver strength with minimal environmental impact, while a kinetic surface recalls the new Macan’s cube pattern.
Gateway stands as part of a broader ambition: showing how visionary design can reconcile the demands of modern urban life with environmental stewardship. The project also feeds into Porsche’s global art initiative, ‘The Art of Dreams’, first launched in Paris in 2021. Each edition invites an artist or collective to interpret the power of dreams, and the programme has since appeared at Singapore Art Week, Milan Design Week, Art Basel Miami, Design Parade Hyères and Frieze Seoul, collaborating with talents such as Ruby Barber, Chris Labrooy and Ezra Miller.
This eighth edition sees Norman Foster—renowned for Beijing Airport, the Millau Viaduct, 30 St Mary Axe and the British Museum’s Great Court—apply his philosophy that architecture, infrastructure and urban planning directly shape quality of life. Through the Madrid-based Norman Foster Foundation, founded in 1999 to encourage interdisciplinary research, he continues to mentor new generations and champion sustainable urban innovation.
