Between Con­struc­tion and Deconstruction

The Design of Monumental Grounds

Chiara Pradel

“Excavations form shapeless mounds of debris, miniature landslides of dust, mud, sand and gravel. Dump trucks spill soil into an infinity of heaps. The dipper of the giant mining power shovel is 25 feet high and digs 140 cu. yds. (250 tons) in one bite. These processes of heavy construction have a devastating kind of primordial grandeur, and are in many ways more astonishing than the finished project—be it a road or a building.”[1]

Creative De-Construction Processes

A direct and empir­ic obser­va­tion of land­scape archi­tec­ture inter­ven­tions, from pri­vate gar­dens to pub­lic parks planned and real­ized in south­ern Switzer­land between 2009 and 2018, has pre­sent­ed an oppor­tu­ni­ty to think about ground move­ments linked with the con­struc­tion phas­es of land­scape and archi­tec­tur­al projects.

To real­ize a new hous­ing project with a vast gar­den on a steep ter­rain fac­ing Lake Mag­giore, more than 60,000 cubic meters of soil were exca­vat­ed, of which approx­i­mate­ly 40,000 were pre­sum­ably deposit­ed with­in anoth­er land­scape. In a sim­i­lar man­ner, to expand a muse­um in Chur whose greater part lays under­ground, almost all the exca­vat­ed soil (225,000 cubic meters) was moved from the con­struc­tion site through an expen­sive pri­vate waste man­age­ment ser­vice. Indeed, inert spoil stor­age in Switzer­land costs approx­i­mate­ly from 25 (exca­vat­ed earth) to 50 (slight­ly pol­lut­ed inert mate­r­i­al) Swiss francs for a sin­gle cubic meter of mate­r­i­al. In some regions, such as the Can­ton of Tici­no, the costs are even high­er, con­sid­er­ing the lack of deposits in the area and the con­se­quent need to export across bor­ders (for exam­ple by fill­ing the numer­ous dis­used quar­ries in Lom­bardy, Italy) mixed waste deriv­ing from con­struc­tion and demo­li­tion. Con­verse­ly, to avoid the export of large quan­ti­ties of mate­r­i­al, an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary design stu­dio work­ing on an urban park near Lugano inves­ti­gat­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ty of repur­pos­ing unpol­lut­ed debris—approximately 2 mil­lion cubic meters—collected from the con­struc­tion site of a near­by road­way as a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of the pre­lim­i­nary design process. 

Ground movements in a construction site. Photo Chiara Pradel
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Ground movements in a construction site. Photo Chiara Pradel

The empir­ic aware­ness of ground move­ments relat­ed to many build­ing sites has led to the re-con­sid­er­a­tion of some basic actions that are often implic­it in land­scape and archi­tec­tur­al prac­tices like dredg­ing, dig­ging, mass grad­ing, slop­ing, con­tour bound­ing, embank­ing and most impor­tant­ly land-fill­ing. Indeed, if we con­sid­er the con­struc­tion or demo­li­tion phas­es of a build­ing, a street, or even a park with atten­tion to the sec­ondary effects of the con­struc­tion activ­i­ties, what we might notice is a sig­nif­i­cant quan­ti­ty of neglect­ed earth (soil, stones or debris) move­ments that gen­er­ate var­i­ous inci­den­tal spaces”[2] and that both pro­vi­sion­al­ly and per­ma­nent­ly affect the land­scape. In par­tic­u­lar, the final” stage of earth move­ments in con­struc­tion process­es, name­ly the (uncon­t­a­m­i­nat­ed) spoil dis­pos­als, from time to time, could be des­ig­nat­ed as land­scap­ing”, envi­ron­men­tal restora­tion”, recul­ti­va­tion”, fill­ing for cul­ti­va­tion”, land-fill­ing” etc. 

Due to the man­i­fold vari­ables involved in con­struc­tion process­es, it is dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy grounds tem­porar­i­ly moved, yet it can be gen­er­al­ly esti­mat­ed that a stan­dard build­ing site pro­duces approx­i­mate­ly thir­ty per­cent debris com­pared to the total weight of build­ing resources. This implies that almost one third of the entire con­struc­tion mate­r­i­al pro­vid­ed in each build­ing site is poten­tial­ly wast­ed and par­tial­ly spurned out. As evi­dence of this fact, in Switzer­land alone one can count more than four hun­dred depots of inert waste spread over the entire nation­al ground, that is already cov­ered by real” moun­tains on two thirds of its sur­face. At the same time, more than fif­teen mil­lion tons of waste from con­struc­tion activ­i­ties have been pro­duced each year[3]; this con­sti­tutes the major flux of gen­er­at­ed waste.

A sequence of author­less, errat­ic earth­works[4] made by spoils, grav­el or aggre­gates are ris­ing togeth­er with cities and their urban churn”[5], stag­ing a sort of cre­ative destruc­tion” par­a­digm —on one hand they bear wit­ness to the main, insa­tiable” con­struc­tion activ­i­ty, and on the oth­er they embody what has been irre­triev­ably sep­a­rat­ed and reject­ed from the process. Debris phys­i­cal­ly resem­ble the pol­lut­ed, melt­ed, tumuli of dirty mate­ri­als pro­duced by min­ing or indus­tries rather than the smooth, pol­ished con­crete, steel or glass archi­tec­tur­al super-struc­ture from which they often come. Their pits, rough ter­rac­ing and heaps allude to the usage of bull­doz­ers and exca­va­tors rather than tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced con­struc­tion tech­niques, lack­ing fea­tures that might allow an attri­bu­tion to a prop­er time and style. 

Like a wide­spread repli­ca of Land Art oeu­vres that pow­er­ful­ly exhib­it the result of dis­rup­tive anthrop­ic actions in both nat­ur­al and post-indus­tri­al landscapes—one thinks, for exam­ple, of the impres­sive Heizer’s Dou­ble Negative (1969), which dis­places 240,000 tons of rhy­o­lite and sand­stone, or of the obses­sive rep­e­ti­tion of Port­fo­lio of Piles by Iain Bax­ter (1968), where arti­fi­cial mounds give form to a kind of jum­bled muse­um” of earth, stag­ing a heap of rub­ble tossed down in con­fu­sion”[6].

A Neglected Design Issue

How­ev­er, despite their mate­r­i­al impact on land­scape, and of the pow­er­ful sug­ges­tion of their forms and sizes, great tumuli from com­plex build­ing sites are treat­ed, as per stan­dard prac­tice, like out­comes to be han­dled as sec­ondary con­cerns. There is a rel­e­vant con­tra­dic­tion between how inert waste depots affect every­day famil­iar spaces, urban set­tle­ments, small his­tor­i­cal vil­lages, nature pro­tect­ed areas and the fact that they are fre­quent­ly con­cealed, and not designed.”[7] As the South African artist William Ken­tridge evi­dences, describ­ing the flat-topped moun­tains made out of rock exca­vat­ed from the gold mines in Johan­nes­burg, both their appear­ance (dur­ing the exca­va­tion of mines), and their slow dis­ap­pear­ance (dur­ing extrac­tion of fine residue of gold dust that remained in the dumps) and dis­man­tling pro­voked a first moment of shock at the recon­fig­u­ra­tion of the land­scape”, prompt­ly fol­lowed by a nat­u­ral­iza­tion of the view, as if the mine dump had nev­er been there”. Accord­ing to Ken­tridge, This adapt­abil­i­ty is more than the flex­i­bil­i­ty to accept a new sit­u­a­tion. It is stronger than that…” as these land­scapes final­ly “…become an object les­son in pro­vi­sion­al­i­ty,”[8] under­go­ing con­tin­u­al mod­u­la­tion as they host trans­for­ma­tive earth­works, mounds of debris, inert waste[9].

While our build­ings, neigh­bor­hoods, cities or infra­struc­tur­al oeu­vres insa­tiably and aggres­sive­ly grow, the relat­ed ground move­ments and result­ing waste mate­ri­als are dis­tanced from our sight and metab­o­lized by our con­scious­ness. Through anony­mous trucks, ships or trains, becom­ing the final step of an unno­ticed exchange of resources, labor, and mate­r­i­al flows, spoils are more often mere­ly dis­lo­cat­ed in sep­a­rate, neglect­ed land­scapes, like immi­grant rocks” arriv­ing from an obscure some­where else[10]. To make their pres­ence evi­dent might con­tra­dict or con­flict with the ide­al­ized ulti­mate oeu­vre or, in some cas­es, unveil a strong dis­crep­an­cy between the image of progress and the (regres­sive) prac­tices that enable its mak­ing.”[11] It is not by chance that the project plan­ning process, in its cur­rent form and in most coun­tries, sim­ply does not con­sid­er the pro­duc­tion, the repo­si­tion­ing or the reuse of exca­vat­ed soil as a top­i­cal land­scape (design) issue. Even if the Waste Frame­work Direc­tive[12] has set the con­struc­tion and demo­li­tion (C&D) inert recy­cling thresh­old at 70 per cent, it has—together with the fol­low­ing EU pro­to­cols and guide­lines[13]—most­ly relied on tech­ni­cal aspects, deep­en­ing the need of soil man­age­ment for great con­struc­tion sites or iden­ti­fy­ing the legal respon­si­bil­i­ty beyond the mate­r­i­al flow and the final spoil storage.

Thus, the major ques­tions aris­ing are: how these kinds of earth­works could be a part of the design-think­ing and process? How is it pos­si­ble to know­ing­ly assem­ble and design a land­scape out of land­filled con­struc­tion ruins? And how these earth­works could change the present archi­tec­tur­al (visu­al, tech­ni­cal, cul­tur­al) language?

From the Local Scale to the Planetary Scale

Ground move­ments have always been gen­er­at­ed by anthrop­ic activ­i­ties, and exca­vat­ed waste mate­ri­als have been know­ing­ly used to shape unex­pect­ed, impres­sive land­scapes, since the ancient Maya prac­tice, using rub­bish or inor­gan­ic refus­es as the core of their mas­sive ter­raced plat­forms, to the Inca con­struc­tion sys­tems which com­bined clean soil with dis­card­ed mate­ri­als. In west­ern cul­ture, some of the best-known exam­ples are the engi­neered parks”[14] real­ized by Lancelot Capa­bil­i­ty” Brown (1716−1783), who shaped extend­ed arti­fi­cial topogra­phies by dig­ging and replac­ing in situ huge amounts of soil to cre­ate arti­fi­cial lakes, or to allow land drainage. Notably vis­i­ble from his­tor­i­cal art­works, pho­tographs or prints, there was a huge earth dis­place­ment for the con­struc­tion of Cen­tral Park (1857−1876). Nev­er­the­less, as Jane Hut­ton reveals in her book Rec­i­p­ro­cal Land­scapes,”[15] dur­ing the real­iza­tion of Cen­tral Park—Frederich Law Olmsted’s masterpiece—quite-unknown transna­tion­al mate­r­i­al move­ments took place and, lit­er­al­ly, moun­tains of guano were shipped from Chin­cha Islands, Peru, to New York in order to fer­til­ize the soil of the Park’s meadows.

These works rep­re­sent (expen­sive) episodes, made in times when earth­works were done by hand and only a small group of land­scape archi­tects and park builders were per­ceiv­ing the aes­thet­ic poten­tial for shap­ing the land.”[16] After the Sec­ond World War, togeth­er with the increased size of mechan­i­cal equip­ment, and, more wide­ly, from the 70s, when envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns became pub­lic fod­der, togeth­er with the inten­si­fy­ing of the con­struc­tion indus­try, artists, archi­tects and land­scape archi­tects began pro­duc­ing mean­ing­ful and acces­si­ble land­scape design solu­tions that explic­it­ly rein­ter­pret­ed vol­umes of inert waste from the con­struc­tion field, placed between art, land­scape design and land recla­ma­tion projects. 

Con­sid­er, for instance, the Olympia­park in Munich by Gün­ter Grz­imek (1968−1972), the icon­ic Pyra­mid by Ricar­do Bofill (1976) placed at the lim­it of the Cata­lan high­way on the French-Span­ish bor­ders (1976), the Irchel­park project in Zürich by Edward Neuen­schwan­der (1978−1985), the Portel­lo Park in Milan by Charles Jencks (2012), the award­ed Northa­la Fields Coun­try Park by FoRM Asso­ciates near the A40 in West Lon­don (2008), or the Amager Strand­park in Copen­hagen (2013), that con­tains 1.5 mil­lion cubic meters of raw mate­r­i­al. In research pub­lished in 2007, Pierre Bélanger relat­ed the process of the under­ground con­struc­tion of Toronto’s down­town pedes­tri­an net­work with the mak­ing of a shore­line ­­– Toron­to Thom­my Thom­son Park: mil­lions of cubic meters of con­crete, earth fill and dredged sand were used to cre­ate a site that now extends about five kilo­me­ters into Lake Ontario, and is more than 250 hectares in size[17].

The increas­ing exten­sion and vol­ume of these exam­ples reveal how large-scale con­struc­tion activ­i­ties are increas­ing­ly lead­ing to the manip­u­la­tion of huge earth move­ments, pass­ing over small to medi­um con­struc­tion activ­i­ties that frag­men­tar­i­ly work on rel­a­tive­ly small exca­va­tions, fills and depots[18]. Con­tem­po­rary infra­struc­tur­al inter­ven­tions are expos­ing extreme earth move­ments whose impact chal­lenges cur­rent con­struc­tion process­es that, in turn, define mean­ing­ful pub­lic debates push­ing for ambi­tious poli­cies that some­times lead to cre­ative solutions. 

The mas­sive 2007 – 16 Pana­ma Canal expan­sion recon­fig­ured trans-Amer­i­can ship­ping and result­ed in glob­al eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal trans­for­ma­tions. Dur­ing con­struc­tion squadrons of exca­va­tors, trucks, trac­tors, and drills blast­ed, cut, dug, hauled, dumped, and crushed rock, sand, and soil. As point­ed out by Bri­an Davis, because the Pana­ma Canal expan­sion has been viewed with­in a logis­ti­cal frame, it has missed the oppor­tu­ni­ties that a land­scape approach would have iden­ti­fied. Con­sid­er the 65 mil­lion cubic meters of mate­r­i­al dredged from the approach chan­nels and from the bot­tom of Gatún Lake. These sed­i­ments are removed by barge, hop­per, truck, and train, or piped through float­ing pon­toon pipelines to depo­si­tion sites locat­ed along the length of the Canal.”[19]

In the near future, this issue could expo­nen­tial­ly expand: in Europe alone, more than 800 mil­lion tons of mate­r­i­al are expect­ed to be exca­vat­ed dur­ing ongo­ing and planned large under­ground projects (such as the immi­nent Stad Ship Tun­nel in Nor­way) by 2030, while on a glob­al lev­el peo­ple are becom­ing the earth’s pri­ma­ry agents of earth moving—through dredg­ing, agri­cul­ture, min­ing and oth­er anthro­pogenic activities—surpassing the nat­ur­al ero­sive forces of wind and water.

At this stage, it is no longer pos­si­ble to con­sid­er these con­struc­tion ruins as delim­it­ed and local phe­nom­e­na, since they are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly affect­ing inter-con­nect­ed open spaces through­out which earth-flows are broad­ly reshap­ing the land­scapes all around us, on a plan­e­tary scale. 

The AlpTransit Landscapes 

Among sev­er­al exist­ing con­tem­po­rary earth­works sce­nar­ios”, con­sid­er­ing the Alpine region at the core of Europe, one can count six major high-speed rails and eight base tun­nels that are already com­plet­ed or under con­struc­tion and that will cross nation­al bor­ders, facil­i­tat­ing the mobil­i­ty of goods and peo­ple, while pre­serv­ing frag­ile and nat­ur­al envi­ron­ments[20].

One hun­dred and fifty years after the real­iza­tion of the 13 kilo­me­ters long Fréjus tunnel—the first of the large tun­nels to pierce its way through the Alps—the con­struc­tion of giant, advanced infra­struc­tures still seem to fight against hid­den tec­ton­ic sys­tems and to con­flict with a vast num­ber of pro­tect­ed nat­ur­al areas (more than 1600 in Switzer­land). These con­tra­dic­tions, inher­ent in the con­tem­po­rary land­scape of the Alps, togeth­er with its immea­sur­able del­i­ca­cy and mys­ter­ies, have been the sub­ject of a sev­en-year study led by Armin Linke: in con­trast with a nos­tal­gic, glossy image often used to rep­re­sent these moun­tains, Linke describes them as a key Euro­pean autonomous satel­lite that is con­nect­ed to glob­al trans­for­ma­tions and their pow­er­ful illu­sions[21].

With­in the spe­cif­ic frame­work of con­tem­po­rary avant-garde” and exper­i­men­tal land­scape sce­nar­ios, and in par­tic­u­lar focus­ing on the Swiss territory—where already one-third of the set­tle­ment and urban sur­face areas is tak­en up by trans­porta­tion sys­tems, name­ly road­ways, rail­way instal­la­tions, air­ports and air­fields[22]—the recent real­iza­tion of the three NRLA base tun­nels (Lötschberg, Got­thard, and Ceneri, 1999–2020) helps to bet­ter con­nect South­ern Ger­many to North­ern Italy and avoids fur­ther land con­sump­tion, while at the same time pre­serv­ing sev­er­al above-ground environments.

Since the begin­ning of the Got­thard Axis project, the con­struc­tor, Alp­Tran­sit Ltd., con­sult­ed trans-dis­ci­pli­nary group Beratungs­gruppe für Gestal­tung”[23], who pro­mul­gat­ed the spe­cif­ic and rec­og­niz­able archi­tec­tur­al lan­guage used for por­tals, viaducts, ven­ti­la­tion fun­nels and retain­ing walls. How­ev­er, as the NRLA tun­nel­ing work has pro­gressed, the com­plex­i­ties between the chal­lenges of con­struc­tion and result­ing mon­u­men­tal ground move­ments have become increas­ing­ly sig­nif­i­cant. Due to these issues spoil man­age­ment engi­neers[24] have become involved to care­ful­ly plan the instal­la­tions and stor­age areas, the time­ly build­ing of pro­cess­ing plants and oth­er han­dling facil­i­ties out­side the tun­nels and eval­u­at­ing the raw mate­r­i­al qual­i­ty to con­vert it into a pri­ma­ry resource for tun­nel con­crete. If the entire exca­va­tion of the Ceneri’s two sin­gle-track tun­nels (15 km long, 2006–2020) gave rise to a total of about 10 mil­lion tons of inert waste, the entire con­struc­tion of the Got­thard Axis (57 km long, 1999–2016) orig­i­nat­ed more than 24 mil­lion tons of mate­r­i­al, of which the 35 per­cent has been reused for pro­duc­ing con­crete and shot­crete aggre­gates, while a con­sid­er­able sur­plus has been des­tined for recul­ti­va­tion require­ments” or envi­ron­men­tal restorations”.

A con­stel­la­tion made of huge ground move­ments has fol­lowed the pro­gres­sion of the Alp­Tran­sit con­struc­tion activ­i­ties from Erst­feld to Vezia (Lugano): par­al­lel to the advance­ment of this oeu­vre, in a num­ber of sites con­nect­ed to the main high speed rail­way path, the earth crust has been bro­ken, pen­e­trat­ed, exca­vat­ed while, some­where else, sites have been filled and altered by those same spoils. The result­ed land­mass­es have nev­er been ful­ly mapped nor has the redress process” of all the affect­ed areas been thor­ough­ly ques­tioned. Although the strong—inspiring—relationship between the Alps and streets or rail­ways has been the object of var­i­ous sur­veys high­light­ing the exist­ing crit­i­cal con­nec­tion between the imag­i­nary, myth­i­cal alpine land­scape and its impli­ca­tions on the col­lec­tive iden­ti­ty, or the con­nec­tion between rough topogra­phies and great engi­neer­ing chal­lenges or between infra­struc­ture, ter­ri­to­ry and strong for­mal archi­tec­tur­al inter­ven­tions, an over­all obser­va­tion of the Alp­Tran­sit land­scapes is still miss­ing. In this respect, the rela­tion­ship between high speed infra­struc­tures, the so-called Infra­struc­tur­al Mon­u­ments”[25]—huge infra­struc­tures that are con­ceived as open, inclu­sive objects, as both com­mon spaces and Megaforms”[26] that, in addi­tion to the realm of trans­porta­tion of goods and labor, syn­the­size the sur­round­ing land­scape, pub­lic spaces and architectures—and their pro­duced mon­u­men­tal ground move­ments is top­i­cal. The focus should shift from the super-struc­tures” and their imme­di­ate­ly vis­i­ble com­po­nents to the inert left­overs dumped-out from the con­struc­tion process, lead­ing to the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and the study of the por­tals, access points, con­struc­tion sites and dis­pos­al areas: the above-ground ele­ments of the NRLA tun­nels should be inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the broad exca­vat­ed earth’s vol­umes spread as spoils in the near­est territories. 

It is pre­cise­ly in that moment, where the exchange between the flux of unshaped mat­ter, the human or mechan­i­cal design and the land­scape that con­tains it takes place, that seems par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing. The earth-deposit indeed comes to life, as a kind of liv­ing organ­ism con­front­ed with the (engi­neers) design deci­sions, earth-mov­ing machin­ery actions, open pos­si­bil­i­ties aris­ing from what the land­scape will become and from the earthwork’s own behavior. 

New mal­leable, change­able, non-deter­min­is­tic and sit­u­a­tion­al archi­tec­tur­al lan­guages are emerg­ing right before our eyes[27].

Sigirino disposal site, 2005, early stage. Drawings by Chiara Pradel
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Sigirino disposal site, 2005, early stage. Drawings by Chiara Pradel

An inves­ti­ga­tion through draw­ing and pho­tographs made by an in situ sur­vey of the Swiss Nation­al Car­tog­ra­phy, the Alp­Tran­sit offi­cial pub­li­ca­tions and the inter­views with mem­bers of the Beratungs­gruppe für Gestal­tung” and of the Alp­Tran­sit AG (a sub­sidiary of the Swiss Fed­er­al Rail­way) has made it pos­si­ble to graph­i­cal­ly frame the phys­i­cal state of the five main NRLA earth­works illus­trat­ing the amount of earth moved and ulti­mate­ly relo­cat­ed into a riv­er delta, two wood­ed val­leys, an alpine vil­lage and an urban periph­ery thanks to dif­fer­ent dis­pos­al strate­gies, that urgent­ly trig­ger, among oth­er things, eco­log­i­cal, topo­log­i­cal and for­mal design questions. 

Five sites—the Reuss Delta, Sedrun, Cavien­ca, Bias­ca and Sigirino—are hosts for the impact­ful inert deposit solu­tions aris­ing from the tun­nel­ing con­struc­tion activ­i­ties. A series of tem­po­ral maps, topo­log­i­cal draw­ings, short descrip­tions and pho­tographs inter­ro­gate the sym­poi­et­ic trans­for­ma­tion of these sites__ where vast ground move­ment oper­a­tions lead to cross the bor­ders between dura­bil­i­ty and tran­sience of geo­log­ic ele­ments, anthrop­ic destruc­tion and recon­struc­tion of land­scapes and could be per­ceived as chal­leng­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties in the end­less­ly change­able Swiss mor­phol­o­gy[28].

The first Alp­Tran­sit earth­works inven­to­ry[29] evi­dences how more than 3.3 mil­lion tons of exca­vat­ed mate­r­i­al from the Got­thard base tun­nel have been trans­port­ed by train and ship to the Delta Reuss and used to fill the Uri lake for the redesign of the pre­vi­ous­ly erod­ed riv­er mouth, or have been spread in dif­fer­ent areas near the Sedrun NRLA access point (more than 4 mil­lion tons), or have been trans­port­ed by a con­vey­or belt through a spoil tun­nel and dumped in the Bias­ca dis­pos­al site (about 6,9 mil­lion tons) to recre­ate a talus cone. More recent­ly, about 7 mil­lion tons of mate­r­i­al orig­i­nat­ing from the Ceneri base tun­nel exca­va­tion process have been dumped in Sigiri­no and assem­bled near the exist­ing moun­tain to form a new, arti­fi­cial mountain. 

Sigirino monumental artificial mountain, 2005–2050. Drawings by Chiara Pradel
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Sigirino monumental artificial mountain,
2005–2050. Drawings by Chiara Pradel

The inven­to­ry might itself become a reser­voir for future projects. In this respect, a series of draw­ings[30] are blend­ing real earth­work states with imag­i­nary future solu­tions, con­tin­u­ing and, some­how, extrem­iz­ing the exist­ing ground mounds, start­ing from the assump­tion that these sites are not fin­ished”, but will rather evolve in the near future. Like in the Reuss Delta site, where the dump of inert waste aris­ing from the Got­thard axis exca­va­tion has allowed to reshape the nat­ur­al cap­i­tal of the delta, but, at the same time, not too far from the riv­er mouth resources and mate­ri­als such as grav­el are still dredged from the lake back­drop. In oth­er deposit sites as well, mate­ri­als will be prob­a­bly added or sub­tract­ed[31] in a cycli­cal process of dis­as­sem­bling and re-assem­bling spoils, of dis­man­tling and reshap­ing the grounds. Less than mere­ly decon­struc­tive and dis­re­gard­ful, these earth-based prac­tices that rely on the reuse of exca­vat­ed mate­ri­als are here provoca­tive­ly con­sid­ered as accre­tive and draw­ings are used to ques­tion if they might add oppor­tu­ni­ties to devel­op reflec­tions, pro­pos­als, future design tra­jec­to­ries in the land­scapes in which they take place. 

Tak­ing advan­tage from this open, flu­id con­di­tion, the draw­ing research process final­ly allows to envi­sion how the five depots could evolve over time as two arti­fi­cial moun­tains (Bias­ca and Sigiri­no), a mon­u­men­tal wall (Cavien­ca), a re-shaped topog­ra­phy (Sedrun), or a re-nat­u­ral­ized riv­er delta (Reuss Delta). 

Sigirino monumental artificial mountain, 2020. Drawings by Chiara Pradel
4

Sigirino monumental artificial mountain, 2020. Drawings by Chiara Pradel


The Design of Monumental Grounds

“To plan for reality therefore means to plan projects that cater to the existence of such remainders, and that anticipate human behavior… Does this imply a return to a perfect world, you ask? On the contrary: it means we renounce any notion of an utterly perfect world being possible.” [32]

The need to reuse earth, to revise construction’s and demolition’s inert waste, to reduce soil con­sump­tion in order to pre­serve an essen­tial and non-renew­able com­po­nent of the nat­ur­al cap­i­tal and to val­orize, in gen­er­al, new ecolo­gies linked to the build­ing activ­i­ties that affect human and non-human envi­ron­ments urge us to bet­ter under­stand all aspects of architecture’s con­tem­po­rary nar­ra­tive, even those con­sid­ered mar­gin­al and resid­ual such as architecture’s debris, to inves­ti­gate the pos­si­ble role of repar­a­tive design and the rede­f­i­n­i­tion of ground-relat­ed for­mal struc­tures inside landscape. 

Start­ing from the mys­te­ri­ous, prim­i­tive earth mounds pass­ing through Dinocrates and the vision­ary project of Mount Athos for Alexan­der the Great or to Vio­let Le Duc’s repeat­ed attempts to design Mont Blanc or to Bruno Taut’s gaze toward the entire Alpine arc, a dri­ve as much ances­tral as it is ten­dent to hubris,[33] accom­pa­nies human beings and push­es them to rethink, draw, and to plan mon­u­men­tal ground-works. 

Even today we face, again, moun­tains and slopes, but they are mon­u­men­tal piles man­i­fest­ed by our mon­u­men­tal debris. 

In a peri­od of over­all eco­log­i­cal decline, an acute under­stand of the com­plex­i­ty of these land­scapes is para­mount; this includes build­ing knowl­edge derived from the nat­ur­al sci­ences, nat­ur­al his­to­ry, and from social, eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal process­es in order to look beyond the sur­face of places or the cel­e­bra­to­ry pos­tures con­cern­ing tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced cycling of mate­r­i­al dis­place­ments.[34] Above all, look­ing at the emerg­ing accu­mu­la­tion of debris, land­scape archi­tects should nei­ther be sat­is­fied with their role as dec­o­ra­tors who spruce-up the left­over, open spaces around infra­struc­ture facil­i­ties, nor with their role as con­ser­va­tion­ists who try to heal land­scapes or defend them from inter­ven­tions.”[35] Poten­tial design approach­es regard­ing mon­u­men­tal earth­works should rather start from the onset and be con­scious­ly direct­ed towards chal­leng­ing topo­log­i­cal site trans­for­ma­tions, pos­si­ble con­struct­ed ecolo­gies[36], new forms emerg­ing from deep cul­tur­al stra­ta made by strong sym­bol­ic pres­ences and his­tor­i­cal mean­ings, altered rela­tions between under­ground and over­ground land­scapes, between human present time and geo­log­i­cal past, human scale and nat­ur­al scale, that are stag­ing the irre­triev­ably unpre­dictable, frag­ile and mon­u­men­tal aspect of anthrop­ic earth­works[37].

Bring­ing back to light and con­scious­ness ele­ments that are oth­er­wise masked, pre­sent­ed as acci­dents or mis­takes, we wit­ness a rever­sal in which the ruins, the left­overs, even the dirt become the sig­ni­fiers of the project process, since if in par­tic­u­lar the ruin is the bear­er of the infor­ma­tion that makes pos­si­ble the pro­found elab­o­ra­tion of the present” the (land­scape) project can­not escape from deal­ing with the recon­struc­tion of ruins.”[38]

  1. 1

    Robert Smith­son, A Sed­i­men­ta­tion of the Mind: Earth Pro­pos­als,” Art­fo­rum 7, 1 (1968): 45.

  2. 2

    The term inci­den­tal space” brings to mind the exhi­bi­tion Mak­ing of Inci­den­tal Space by Chris­t­ian Kerez held at the 5th Archi­tec­ture Bien­nale in Venice in 2016. Through this work, Kerenz sought to cre­ate an imag­i­nary, form­less space, whose visu­al char­ac­ter can­not be some­thing eas­i­ly decoded.

  3. 3

    Enlarg­ing one’s vision to an inter­na­tion­al con­text, things are not much bet­ter: in Europe more than 840 mil­lion tons of con­struc­tion and demo­li­tion waste, the stark major­i­ty of which is made of con­crete debris, are pro­duced each year (EU 2018).

  4. 4

    To title one of his most famous works, Robert Smith­son re-inter­pret­ed the Bri­an W. Ald­iss sci­ence fic­tion nov­el head­ing: Earth­works, where the author describes a future Earth wrecked by the effects of over­pop­u­la­tion and by heavy envi­ron­men­tal reper­cus­sions of inten­sive, expan­sive, and destruc­tive over-farm­ing. Smith­son used the same term Earth­work to name his instal­la­tion made of mate­ri­als such as crude soil, debris and sand, placed on the floor of the Dwan Gallery, New York. The expo­si­tion, curat­ed by Vir­ginia Dwan, took place in 1968.

  5. 5

    Suzanne Hall and Ricky Bur­dett, Urban Churn,” in The Sage Hand­book of the 21st Cen­tu­ry City, eds. Suzanne Hall and Ricky Bur­dett (Lon­don: Sage Pub­li­ca­tion, 2017), 15.

  6. 6

    Smith­son, A Sed­i­men­ta­tion of the Mind: Earth Pro­pos­als,” 45.

  7. 7

    Chiara Pradel, From Infra­struc­tur­al Con­struc­tion Sites to Land­scape,” in CA2RE. Strate­gies of Design-Dri­ven Research, eds. Claus Ped­er Ped­er­sen, Tade­ja Zupančič, Markus Schwai, Jo Van Den Berghe and Thier­ry Lagrange, (Aahrus: Aarhus School of Archi­tec­ture, 2021), 89.

  8. 8

    William Ken­tridge, Six Draw­ing Lessons (Lon­don: Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2014), 88.

  9. 9

    Mat­ter is always already an ongo­ing his­tor­i­cal­i­ty. In the phe­nom­e­nal world, every mate­r­i­al is a becom­ing.” Tim Ingold, Toward an Ecol­o­gy of Mate­ri­als,” Annu­al Review of Anthro­pol­o­gy 41 (2012): 435.

  10. 10

    The def­i­n­i­tion immi­grant rocks” has been tak­en up by an essay by Doren Massey: It was hun­dreds of mil­lions of years lat­er that these rocks of Skid­daw crossed the equa­tor on their way through this lat­i­tude, now, and lat­er still that they were formed into any­thing we might call a moun­tain. What is impor­tant here is not the for­mal knowl­edge (such tec­ton­ic wan­der­ings are now part of pop­u­lar sci­ence) but what one allows it to do to the imag­i­na­tion. For me, ini­tial­ly, this dwelt upon the thought that these are immi­grant rocks…” Doren Massey, Land­scape as a Provo­ca­tion: Reflec­tions on Mov­ing Moun­tains,” Jour­nal of Mate­r­i­al Cul­ture 11 (2006): 34–35.

  11. 11

    Jane Hut­ton, Mate­r­i­al Cul­ture: Assem­bling and Dis­as­sem­bling Land­scapes (Berlin: Jovis, 2018), 18.

  12. 12

    Direc­tive 2008/98/EC of the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment and of the Coun­cil of 19 Novem­ber 2008 on waste and repeal­ing cer­tain Direc­tives (OJ L 312, 22.11.2008), 3–30.

  13. 13

    See the EU Con­struc­tion & Demo­li­tion Waste Man­age­ment Pro­to­col” (Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, 2016), the Guide­lines for the waste audits before demo­li­tion and ren­o­va­tion works of build­ings” (Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, 2018), the report Cir­cu­lar Econ­o­my Action plan for a clean­er and more com­pet­i­tive Europe” (Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, 2020).

  14. 14

    To build the arti­fi­cial lake at Pet­worth for the Pet­worth House gar­den (1753), the first major work by Capa­bil­i­ty Brown, it have been exca­vat­ed and moved some 60,000 tons of soil, that was used to build an earth dam (15,000 tons) and to mod­i­fy the topog­ra­phy of the estate (the remain­der), thus cre­at­ing heav­i­ly arti­fi­cial land­scape. See: Clarke Gold­smith et al., Engi­neer­ing the land­scape – Capa­bil­i­ty Brown’s role,” Engi­neer­ing His­to­ry and Her­itage 170 (2017): 21.

  15. 15

    Jane Hut­ton, Rec­i­p­ro­cal Land­scapes: Sto­ries of Mate­r­i­al Move­ments (Lon­don: Rout­ledge, 2019), 25–64.

  16. 16

    Peter Walk­er, For­word,” in Grad­ing for Land­scape Archi­tects and Archi­tects, ed. Peter Petschek, (Boston: Birkhauser, 2008), 9.

  17. 17

    Pierre Bélanger, Under­ground land­scape: The urban­ism and infra­struc­ture of Toronto’s down­town pedes­tri­an net­work,” in Tun­nelling and Under­ground Space Tech­nol­o­gy 22 (2007): 272–292.

  18. 18

    The lack of geo­graph­i­cal and tem­po­ral over­lap between dif­fer­ent ground activ­i­ties or the need to fol­low, dur­ing the design process, stan­dard­ized pro­ce­dures could lim­it the rethink­ing and redesign of inert mate­ri­als in small con­struc­tion sites.

  19. 19

    Bri­an Davis, Rob Holmes and Brett Mil­li­gan, Isth­mus,” Places Jour­nal, 2015.

  20. 20

    The six high speed rail­ways are: Genoa Mar­seille, Milan-Lyon, Genoa-Basel, Genoa-Zurich, Verona-Munich, Venice-Vien­na. The eight base tun­nels in the Alpine arc are: the Mont Cenis (ongo­ing) between Italy and France, the Got­thard (2016), the Ceneri (2020), the Lötschberg (2007) in Switzer­land, the Bren­ner (ongo­ing) between Italy and Aus­tria, the Sem­mer­ing (ongo­ing) and the Koralm (ongo­ing) in Aus­tria. For an over­look on the Alpine region high speed rails see the pub­lished stud­ies: Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, Study on Mediter­ranean TEN‑T Core Net­work Cor­ri­dor. Final Report, (Lux­em­bourg: Pub­li­ca­tions Office of the Euro­pean Union, 2018); Elisa Ravaz­zoli et al., The Effects of the Planned High-Speed Rail Sys­tem on Trav­el Times and Spa­tial Devel­op­ment in the Euro­pean Alps,” Moun­tain Research and Devel­op­ment 37 (2017): 131–140.

  21. 21

    Armin Linke, dir. Alpi, based on a research project of Piero Zani­ni, Rena­to Rinal­di and Armin Linke, 16mm, trans­ferred on Blu-ray/D­CP, 2011.

  22. 22

    Chris­t­ian Schubarth and Felix Weibel, Land Use in Switzer­land. Results of the Swiss land use sta­tis­tics, (Neuchâ­tel: Fed­er­al Sta­tis­ti­cal Office, 2013), 8–9.

  23. 23

    The BGG was com­posed by: Uli Huber, pres­i­dent (from 1993), Pierre Fed­der­sen (from 1993), Rain­er Kloster­mann (from 1993), Flo­ra Ruchat-Ron­cati (from 1993 to 2012), Pas­cal Sigrist (from 1997), the Alp­Tran­sit AG rep­re­sen­ta­tives: Thomas Bhüler, Alex Regli, Wal­ter Schnee­be­li, Peter Zbinden.

  24. 24

    See in par­tic­u­lar the planned mit­i­ga­tion mea­sures described in: Pao­lo Lan­franchi et al., Envi­ron­men­tal recla­ma­tion for the Got­thard Base Tun­nel, effects of spoil man­age­ment on land­scape,” in Tun­nels and Under­ground Cities: Engi­neer­ing and Inno­va­tion meet Archae­ol­o­gy, Archi­tec­ture and Art, eds. Daniele Peila et al. (Lon­don: Tay­lor & Fran­cis Group, 2019), 405–414.

  25. 25

    Stan Allen, Infra­struc­tur­al Urban­ism,” in Infra­struc­tur­al Mon­u­ment eds. MIT Cen­ter for Advanced Urban­ism, (New York: Prince­ton Archi­tec­tur­al Press, 2016), 58.

  26. 26

    I’ve coined the term megaform in order to refer to the form-giv­ing poten­tial of cer­tain kinds of hor­i­zon­tal urban fab­ric capa­ble of effect­ing some kind of topo­graph­ic trans­for­ma­tion in the mega­lopoli­tan land­scape.” Ken­neth Fram­ton, Megaform As Urban Land­scape, (Ann Arbor: Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, 1999), 16.

  27. 27

    Bran­don Clif­ford, The Cannibal’s Cook­book. Min­ing Myths of Cyclo­pean Con­struc­tions, (San Fran­cis­co: ORO Edi­tions, 2017), 23.

  28. 28

    The cur­rent Alpine chain is the result of two oppos­ing mov­ing forces: an endoge­nous one that push­es the earth's crust upwards in a very com­pli­cat­ed sys­tem of aquifers and mas­sifs and an endoge­nous one that smash­es the moun­tain chain. Nine­ty mil­lion years ago, as tec­ton­ic plates col­lid­ed, min­er­al waves arose from the scorch­ing waters of the Tethys Ocean: they stretched them­selves, broke apart and merged togeth­er. Dur­ing the Qua­ter­nary, these rocks were filled, carved, and smoothed by ice sheets, whose melt­ing revealed a kalei­do­scope of val­leys with steep sides and flat bot­toms. Still today, the Alps are ris­ing and push­ing North.

  29. 29

    The draw­ings form a first inven­to­ry” of the Alp­Tran­sit infrastructural/monumental main earth­works since these land­scapes made by spoils have nev­er been rep­re­sent­ed in their entire­ty, as a sys­tem of ground move­ments linked to the new infrastructure.

  30. 30

    The visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions [ 3–4 ] func­tion as a form of research on the plas­tic sub­stra­tum of land­scape, of its hid­den laten­cies and of its dis­tinc­tive result­ing shapes.

  31. 31

    As in Bias­ca or in Sigiri­no, where the pos­si­ble deposit of fur­ther C&D mate­ri­als has already been dis­cussed by local author­i­ties. Sigiri­no in par­tic­u­lar will grow up as the high­est Swiss arti­fi­cial moun­tain (about 160m high), con­tain­ing up to 7 mil­lion tons of spoils.

  32. 32

    Lucius Bur­ck­hardt, Dirt,” in Lucius Bur­ck­hardt Writ­ings. Rethink­ing Man-made Envi­ron­ments. Pol­i­tics, Land­scape & Design, eds. Jesko Fez­er and Mar­tin Schmitz, (Wien: Springer Ver­lag, 2012), 169.

  33. 33

    In par­tic­u­lar, the extra­or­di­nary vision by Dinocrates was chron­i­cled by Vit­ru­vio in the first cen­tu­ry BC and by Plutar­co in the first cen­tu­ry AD. Sub­se­quent­ly Leon Bat­tista Alber­ti in his De re aed­i­fi­ca­to­ria’ (1486) explic­it­ly crit­i­cized Dinocrates, con­sid­er­ing his pro­pos­al to design a moun­tain as a neg­a­tive mod­el and an emblem of hubris and excess.

  34. 34

    Jen­nifer Fos­ter and Hei­dy Schopf, Min­er­al Migra­tion: Extract­ing, Recom­pos­ing, Demol­ish­ing, and Recol­o­niz­ing Toronto’s Land­scape,” in Mate­r­i­al Cul­ture: Assem­bling and Dis­as­sem­bling Land­scapes, eds. Jane Hut­ton, (Berlin: Jovis, 2018), 47–63.

  35. 35

    Wil­helm Krull, Topol­o­gy,” in Topol­o­gy. Top­i­cal Thoughts on the Con­tem­po­rary Land­scape, eds. Cristophe Girot et al. (Berlin: Jovis 2012), 13.

  36. 36

    Con­struct­ed ecol­o­gy” here refers to a man-made process that, in a com­plete­ly arti­fi­cial envi­ron­ment, implies the cre­ation of dynam­ic spaces which could extend the bound­aries of infra­struc­tur­al inter­ven­tions to the mul­ti­tude of non­hu­man beings and gen­er­ate the spe­cif­ic mor­phol­o­gy, het­ero­gene­ity and per­for­ma­tiv­i­ty of nat­ur­al environments.

  37. 37

    Chiara Pradel, Mov­ing Ground. The Con­struc­tion of Alp­Tran­sit Infra­struc­ture and its Mon­u­men­tal Land­scapes,” Ardeth 7 (2020): 67–83.

  38. 38

    Lucius Bur­ck­hardt, L’intervento min­i­mo,” in Il Fal­so è l’autentico. Polit­i­ca, pae­sag­gio, design, architet­tura, piani­fi­cazione, ped­a­gogia, eds. Gae­tano Lica­ta and Mar­tin Schmitz, (Mac­er­a­ta: Quodli­bet, 2019), 147. Trans­la­tion by the author.

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