Based on the details of an unrealized project by Paulo Mendes da Rocha — an island shaped like a theater in the middle of the bay of the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo — Pisani develops an analysis of the core of the architect's thinking: the construction of territory, the transformation of nature through human action. As in a detective investigation, Pisani extracts from extensive documentary material from Mendes da Rocha's daily life — notes in the margins of books, scattered notes and banal sketches — valuable clues to delve into the depths of the architect's imagination and work. In tracing this genealogy of Paulo Mendes da Rocha's imagination, the city of Venice emerges, with its representations, debates and interventions over the centuries, from Alvise Cornaro to Aldo Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri.