Pradel / The Design of the Monumental Grounds Moved by the AlpTransit Construction Activities in the Swiss Landscapes

The Design of the Monumental Grounds Moved by the AlpTransit Construction Activities in the Swiss Landscapes

Author: Chiara Pradel, AUID, DAStU, Politecnico di Milano

Supervisor: Alessandro Rocca, Professor Dr., (Polimi), AUID, DAStU, Politecnico di Milano

Research stage: Intermediate/final doctoral stage

Category: Paper

DDR Statement

A Night Flight, Four steps for the Research Process

It is challenging to deepen a “design-based thinking”. It could be strongly disrupting and together surprising to make the research activity something that can be shared and discussed _ of course with the awareness that not everything inside a such complex process could be quantifiable, nor every step could be definitively fixed, since it is part of an evolving, dynamic, transformative progression.

The research process, for the moment, could be subdivided into four main components:

  • an observation phase: an inductive and interpretative approach, intrinsic of landscape design discipline, that starts from a personal interaction with the treated phenomena.
  • The delineation of a theoretical framework, namely the identification of the state of the art, that advances contextually to the observation.
  • The examination of a relevant case study.
  • A research trough drawings, that mainly uses drawings as tools to carry out the critical investigation on the selected landscapes, questioning how massive earth movements could become part of a design language. In particular temporal maps, made by plans, sections, pictures and schemes of main typological solutions, act as a critical de-composition (reading-action), to understand the structure of landscapes and the physiognomy of the grounds far beyond the act of seeing. Topographical drawings trace praxis of new morphology and ground movements before, during and after the realization of the infrastructure. Conceptual design proposals are finally developed as a fundamental part of the research and are based on a re-composition (writing-action) that is a reconstruction of main and latent relationships of the site: they unveil the new structures of monumental grounds.