“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
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
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
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
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]