Architectural Design V-IX: Landscape Infrastructures - Strong Shapes (GD Menn)

Abstract

From our territorial research in Bergell and dealing with process and machine in the last semester, we shift our focus to energy infrastructures in the alpine landscape. They interest us materially and culturally as incisive and permanent form constants in the landscape and architecturally as models of design principles.

Objective

We would like to "learn" from infrastructure structures and practice capturing and conceptually translating structural features and principles into an architectural design. The connection with current issues of energy policy, hydropower and the change in the alpine landscape conveys a higher level of thinking in systems. We learn to take a critical stance on the subject, to express it in a design and to develop a coherent project.

Content

We deal with hydropower structures that were built at the beginning of the 20th century and expanded from local plants to large-scale systems in the mountains in the second half. Water, in its various states of aggregation, has shaped the geomorphological processes and the relief of space for millions of years. The use of water to generate energy means a significant intervention in the water balance and the ecology of the landscape. In the context of climate change and the phase-out of nuclear power, these infrastructures are a current focus. The energy strategy of the federal government plans a turnaround in the power supply by 2050 with the increase in capacity for water use. We see the expansion of the energy infrastructure as not just a technical task, but an interdisciplinary architectural one. These timeless interventions raise the question of architecture to and from the landscape, its identity in Alpine culture and the architectural potential. We want to understand power plants from the perspective of architecture and approach architectural designs from their point of view. Can we draw insights from the structural characteristics, such as the efficiency of processes, the economy of means, robust structures and spaces - whose choreography, geometry and scale are beyond common spatial experiences? Do they harbor the potential for an architecture of unmediated, open-use, permanent and thus sustainable structures? The design task is part of the expansion project for the Brusio power plants in the Puschlav region of Graubünden. As one of the earliest complexes from the 1910s, it is characterized by the iconographic buildings of the architect Nicolaus Hartmann. Within this spatial and historical, as well as energy-related context, we are dealing with strategies for the conversion and expansion of the Cavaglia and Robbia locations. We are interested in developing a conceptual, programmatic narrative and architectural expression. The projects are looking for an attitude to overriding questions of the energy transition and formulate design answers at a specific location.

Resources