Building landscape. A new road infrastructure as an occasion for a multidisciplinary approach to a landscape project

This work presents an analytical study founded on the assumption that the design of a new infrastructure (not only road-infrastructure) is primarily the transformation of a portion of landscape (natural or anthropic). This endeavor is undertaken with a methodological approach that is able to avoid resulting in a project that is just specialized in one aspect. This goal is reached through the definition of a new road infrastructure, respecting technical and legal requirements, within a residual logic that has to both mitigate the impact on the landscape and the environmental system of which it will be part. The study involves a group of researchers from Politecnico di Milano called to support the different parts of the project of a road infrastructure in the area north of Milano - Como province. Therefore, the project should assume specific and aware intentions aimed at transforming the environment and the landscape itself. The environmental aspects involved are many: ecological (vegetational, forestry, wildlife biodiversity), hydraulic (rainwater, irrigation, surface water and groundwater), agronomic (farm and cultivation system), acoustic and air quality. Many are also the needs of the landscape: conservation and land protection (architectonical and spatial part to enhance, point of view to define), fruition and tourism (paths and rest areas), and an architectural design (contextual section, new assets for greenery). The study represents an opportunity to work in a multidisciplinary context able to involve a contribution of different knowledges, but also to develop a multi-scalar project that deals with a large territory in which the new road is the core, in its specific condition of linear infrastructure, capable of linking far places and of defining margins, materials and rainwater collection system. The dimensions of a road, in the specification of a section able to vary adapting to context - not only according to legal, technical and functional reasons but also guided by visual relations, protection and enhancements triggered by the project - are the most interesting aspects of multi-scalar design. This process resolves itself in an exploratory progression of the territory at many scales. It presumes to consider the road as the possibility of a mutual design process that works on a large and small scale: a sort of elastic line between the roadside and the landscape dimension. “restarting from landscape means overall having the awareness that acting of the territory is like entering in history that others helped build before us” (Pinter 2003). Roads become a readable and indissoluble part of the landscape itself. Mostly vanguard and development promoters, they represent the land palinsesto with which it is possible to interact. The landscape re-writes itself through a net of connections that changes and transforms itself in time. If only some of them could get a chance to be redone through a museum-like logic (for example road Timmelsjoch), the new project has the duty of considering itself as a multidisciplinary experimentation. The challenge of designing this road was to conceive it as a system with the dual complex role that a highly trafficked linear infrastructure has: dividing different parts of the territory and also connecting and integrating the context it crosses.