Moving Ground. The Construction of AlpTransit Infrastructure and its Monumental Landscapes

Infrastructures as high-speed railways are a contemporary debated topic with political, economic and environmental impacts. In the Alpine arc alone, located in the heart of Europe, as of today six HSR lines are planned or have been realized. Within this framework, the article probes the case of the New Rail Link through the Alps that connects Germany to Italy through Switzerland. This “Infrastructural Monument” in fact produces a number of ground movements that are affecting and shaping the ever-changing Swiss mountainous landscapes: millions of cubic meters of excavated material arising from tunnelling and construction activities are spread among the railway’s nearest territories. What could be the role of design and landscape architecture? This research is intended as an instrument to deepen the design meaning of moving ground actions, reflecting on how, millennia after the first ancestral earth mounds, these monumental earthworks could today become part of a continuously renewed poetic imagination.