Architectural Design V-IX: Bergell - Records of a Territory (GD C.Menn)

Abstract

Is the Bergell a geographically and economically isolated "chamber" in the border area? A remote place of poetry, but of standstill and resignation, threatened by nature? In our exploratory notes we are interested in the relationship between the landscape and the architecture and their history of ideas.

Objective

The students learn to discover a landscape and cultural area in its multi-layered temporal and spatial dimensions, which enables them to take a critical approach to the present. You will learn from this and from the resource of the location to form an architectural idea and develop it into a consistent project.

Content

The geography and history of the valley is characterized by amplitudes and contrasts. Topographically and climatically a steep drop from the alpine pass heights to the almost Mediterranean Lombardy plain, for centuries one of the most important alpine transit arteries favored the implementation of a foreign culture that combined with the symbiotic rural way of life. The relocation of traffic routes and geopolitical shifts initiated isolation and migration in the first half of the 19th century, which the construction of power plants in the 1950s counteracted. The recent landslide in Bondo exemplified the consequences of climate change in the Alpine region. We are looking for an approach to the present by researching the territory and understanding the history and its structural forms. Is the Bergell a geographically and economically isolated "chamber" in the border area? A remote place of poetry, but of standstill and resignation, threatened by nature? In our exploratory notes we are interested in the relationship between the landscape and the architecture and their history of ideas. Based on our analysis, we design a public meeting space, a "multi uso" for the people of the valley. The multi-purpose room damaged by the landslide raises the social need for a place of identification and orientation, for which we consider the entire valley area as a possible location. Using speculative interventions, we take an architectural position in the reference space of history and landscape. - Perhaps as foreign as the idea of ​​baroque geometry in the steep mountain landscape, as rigorous as the Albignia dam, as inconspicuous as the rural Cascina in the chestnut grove or as poetically enigmatic as the garden of ruins of Lan Müraia. They all aim to emerge in their attitude from the structure of the valley and finally to be woven into it again as a critical re-recording of the territory.

Resources