Towards Integrating Infrastructure and Landscape

S.064-071_Shannon_M11korr.qxd 23.02.2011 17:46 Uhr Seite 64 Kelly Shannon, Marcel Smets Towards Integrating Infrastructure and Landscape In order to function, fit and be acceptable, infrastructure needs to enhance the quality of the landscape.Three major design approaches are overwhelmingly evident in a review of exemplary built projects from around the globe. T oday, the creation of transportation infrastructure is no longer simply the accumulation of large technical objects in isolation from their surroundings. More and more, landscape and infrastructure merge and movement corridors are reworked as new vessels of collective life. An entirely new spectrum of the public realm has become a fascinating terrain for investigation. In order to function, fit and be acceptable, infrastructure needs to enhance the quality of the landscape. Hence, conceiving infrastructure blends with generating architecture, building landscapes, and producing urban settings and living environments. It engages social and imaginative dimensions as much as engineering. In these respects, the design of transport infrastructure is an integrated project. Once married with architecture, mobility, and landscape, infrastructure can more meaningfully integrate territories, reduce marginalization and segregation, and stimulate new forms of interaction. It can then truly become “landscape.” The most elementary way in which infrastructure affects or creates landscape is by its material presence. The territorial dimension of infrastructure – its sheer bigness and muscularity – categorically ensures it is visually impressive within the landscape. In several cases, the juxtaposition of infrastructure and natural landscapes enhances the distinctions between them. Leo Marx has aptly referred to the sublime qualities of the machine in the garden – the contrast between the ideal Arcadia and the corrupting influences of civilization. Inevitably and unavoidably, infrastructure fundamentally changes the original situation of a territory.While establishing a connection, it also produces a rupture. In urbanized settings, infrastructure often isolates by constructing Towards integration, tunnel artifice: The entrances by Flora Ruchat-Ronacti and Renato Salvi mark a transition and create rhythms along the A16 Highway from Switzerland to France. 64 S.064-071_Shannon_M11korr.qxd 23.02.2011 17:46 Uhr Seite 65 65 S.064-071_Shannon_M11korr.qxd 23.02.2011 17:46 Uhr Seite 66 barriers. The intrusion of the machine into a natural, bucolic landscape challenges the ecological balance and the beauty of the scenery. The production of noise, pollution, and other nuisances turn infrastructure into a fiend rather than a friend. For these reasons, making infrastructure inexorably poses the question of integration into the surrounding environment. Towards integration, multi- T hree major design approaches are overwhelmingly evident in a review of exemplary built projects from around the globe worthy of a more in-depth interrogation: hiding/ camouflage, fusion, and detachment. The first arises from the instinct to deal with the compromising effects of infrastructure upon the land- layered roadside: The Gran Via De Les Corts Catalanes in Barcelona, a major transport artery, has been remodeled into a sectionally rich urban boulevard by Arriola & Fiol arquitectes. 66 scape. A growing environmental awareness, coupled with the NIMBY syndrome, has resulted in a spectrum of projects that have gone to great lengths and expense to bury or hide both existing and new infrastructure. There clearly exists a societal consensus to hide the visibly undesirable. Concealment through topographical manipulations and clever design in section is often a mechanism employed to render infrastructure inconspicuous. Hiding seeks to obscure or obliterate an infrastructural intervention. By doing so, it creates a paradoxical situation, namely the illusion of an acceptable landscape when it has actually been destroyed by the heavily engineered infrastructure underneath. Languages of invisibility recast infrastructure and utilize its disturbance to create S.064-071_Shannon_M11korr.qxd 23.02.2011 17:46 Uhr or suggest landscape and community linkages. A double world is thus constructed: the underworld of traffic and train movement, stench, noise, and parking versus the upper world of beauty, delight, recreation, and social interaction. Within the artifice of hiding, two broad categories can be distinguished. The first deals with urban areas, the second with open landscape. In urban settings, burying highways, railroads, and parking garages not only solves a visual problem but also, in many instances, creates valuable real estate and enlarges the public realm. In the open countryside, hiding takes on another role. Earthworks and the insertion of neighborhood-related programs are employed to mask otherwise brutal infrastructural impositions on the landscape. Seite 67 Slightly different than hiding is the notion of camouflage, which has its roots in military techniques. The combat philosophy of blending with nature and taking on the color of the surroundings is recognizable in infrastructural projects situated in particularly dense urban contexts and environmentally vulnerable territories. The concept of imperceptibility through assimilation shares similarities with that of hiding and putting out of sight. When incorporation into the surrounding environment is fully achieved, a foreign body is no longer visible. Camouflage is thus a vital form of hiding that does not create two worlds, but rather has the alien landscape of traffic and circulation assume the form of its environs and therefore disappear. Towards integration, sectional manipulation: Itineraries of congestion and movement create a gallery of civic understanding at the Intermodal Station Square, Louvain, Belgium by Projectteam Stadsontwerp/Marcel Smets, Manuel de Solà Morales/ A33 and SWK. 67 S.064-071_Shannon_M11korr.qxd 23.02.2011 17:46 Uhr Seite 68 The features of the existing landscape are underlined in this approach. Obviously the disappearance of infrastructure is never fully achieved. For this reason, it rather prevails as an ideal objective and should be distinguished as a separate attitude from hiding. Fundamentally, two modes of assimilation through camouflage can be differentiated, one which duplicates the formal appeal of a particular landscape and a second that echoes its structural features. The latter gives way to an attitude of inclusion, whereby existing structures of the landscape are underlined and/or processes of authentic landscape formation are orchestrated. The former leads to replication, and has embedded within it the danger of yielding to the Towards integration, vector works: In the Seattle Olympic Sculpture Park, Weiss/Manfredi create topographical continuity between city and coast with an artificial landscape over infrastructure. 68 picturesque. The strategy of inclusion aims to integrate a foreign object into a territory and make it seem as though it had always been there. This strategy is a more explicit form of deception, through the tactic of replication whereby infrastructure and building types are literally camouflaged. Integration, or not being seen, allows an otherwise visible object to remain indiscernible from the surrounding environment. F usion involves the combining of two distinct things, the merging of different elements into one. Fusion is a state of amalgamation, of joining together into a single entity. In science, composites are made of distinct components. Their primary elements are comple- S.064-071_Shannon_M11korr.qxd 23.02.2011 17:46 Uhr mentary substances that combine to produce structural or functional properties that are not present in any individual component. In an inclusive landscape project, inspiration is taken from the existing territory, but the initial situation is, in turn, amended by the infrastructure that becomes part of it. Absorption of a foreign element into a context always transforms that context.Any new addition inevitably changes the existing environment through its presence. Integration in this sense is not attained by trying to color the new intervention in accordance with its surroundings, but by reconfiguring the preexisting setting into a new composite landscape. In this approach, infrastructure is evidently rendered visible, but doesn’t stand on its own. The new for- Seite 69 mal organization takes into account all technical demands, but gives way to an all-embracing and unique environment. It is developed as a specific solution from the programmatic requirements and the constraints of flux and traffic on one hand, and the local morphology and topography on the other. As different elements and considerations merge into a new, original composition, they inevitably rely on urbanism. There are a growing number of projects that aim to blur distinctions between natural landscape and created infrastructure, which is evident in the manipulation of the ground plane and creation of artificial topographies in the fusion into a new composite. The use of a seemingly multipurpose structure – it appears as an all-embracing, complex, and Detachment, engineered elegance: The curved cablestayed Sunniberg Bridge in Prättigau Valley, Switzerland by Andrea Deplazes and Christian Menn underlines the presence of an imposing landscape. 69 S.064-071_Shannon_M11korr.qxd 23.02.2011 17:46 Uhr Seite 70 Kelly Shannon, Marcel Smets The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure NAi Publishers, Rotterdam 2010 ISBN 978-90-5662-720-1 It is clear that infrastructural development is no longer merely a technical matter to be left to traffic planners, engineers, and politicians, but a crosscutting field that involves multiple sectors and where the role of designers is essential. In “The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure”, a taxonomy of approaches was developed in response to how the design of transport infrastructure affects the landscape and how it is perceived.The over-arching theme (and first book chapter) argues that mobility constitutes the footprint of urbanization, and explores the role of transportation networks in structuring urbanization. It analyzes the ways in which the transformation of accessibility shape the spatial organization of the territory and investigates how the form of the transport network either emphasizes the global character that the network enhances or strengthens the local identity of the places it crosses. A second chapter focuses on the physical presence that infrastructure inevitably imposes on its environs. It discusses the different approaches toward the integration of these large objects into the surrounding landscape, both from the point of view of avoiding the hindrances that they create and the opportunity they contain for investing in the overall refurbishment of the areas. The third category of design strategies fundamentally considers the ways in which the motion generated by transport infrastructure affects the perception of the surrounding landscape. Detachment, colonizing the It shows the diverse methods that designers make use of to stress this idea of movement in the roof of the world: Money, layout of their infrastructure, often with the intention of increasing the legibility of the environs politics and technology have now enabled construction of it traverses. Finally, the fourth approach reflects on the role of infrastructure as public space. infrastructure on of the Considering its sheer number of users – comparable to attendance at major sports events – and world’s most extreme land- its easy accessibility in practical and social terms, transport infrastructure has clearly become the scapes as the Qinghai-Tibet prime public space of the present day, particularly in countries where the classical public urban realm (market place, road, and roadside parking) has been replaced by a collective private realm (shopping mall, parking building, etc.). But the specific nature of transport accommodations means that they entail a common experience not only of place but also of voyage.Therefore, designers portraying these spaces typically highlight the various types of behavior displayed by people on the move. Design attitudes toward transport infrastructure are, in this respect, also revealing of the mindset of society in general toward the significance of public space. 70 Railroad by Li Jin Cheng. S.064-071_Shannon_M11korr.qxd 23.02.2011 17:46 Uhr diversified topography – that is constructed as a singular built intervention, masks the differences between inside and outside, soil and roof, mass and void, transparent and opaque. Finally, all said, infrastructure, by its very nature, is a colonization of land and there is a plethora of examples monumentalizing man’s ability to tame and conquer nature though technology and innovation, engineering, and infrastructural feats. The self-reliance of objects through their detachment from their environs often results in astonishing spatial expressions in which technology is frequently paraded. In many instances, infrastructure appears to float over the landscape, seemingly leaving it untouched. In this sense, infrastructure maintains a relation of har- Seite 71 mony with the environs, while simultaneously matching up to its own form-determining principles. The attitude thus permits the combination of self-adornment of the beautiful object with the appeal of an untouched natural landscape as backdrop. The attitude repeatedly leads to the creation of self-referential objects, attracting all attention and, in fact to the absolute disregard of context. If infrastructure is cleverly designed, the splendor of settings can even be emphasized; through sheer dimension, it can indeed serve as a magnificent reference, underlining the presence of imposing landscape features. The architecture of bridge building is certainly an opportunity for elegant engineering feats, and in the early 20th century radical new forms began to blur the boundaries between civil engineering and architecture. In many instances, the astonishing beauty of the natural landscape is accentuated by the bridges – the measure and degree of the expanse or topographical change is underlined as valleys are spanned by a horizontal datum. Detachment is also evident in works that reveal an indifference to or remoteness from their immediate surroundings. There are numerous examples of infrastructural projects that convey aloofness through reliance on the notion of construction and beauty for their own sake. The monumental fascination with the relationships between function, technology, and aesthetics in a graceful structural form has long occupied architects. And, it appears that this fascination and approach is still with us. 71