Il paesaggio “attraversato” Inserimento paesaggistico delle grandi infrastrutture lineari – Crossed Landscapes Integration of large infrastructures into the landscape

by Lorenzo Vallerini (editor)

EDIFIR Edizioni, Florence, Italy

© 2009

Italian text

236 pp., ill., cm 25×25, € 35,00

ISBN 978-88-7970-405-2

The issues related to the integration of large infrastructures into the landscape have long been addressed in many European countries. The book presents methodologies and case studies that can support and guide the transformations that affect the landscape, with particular attention to projects that involve the construction of large transport, road, motorway and other types of infrastructure and works that have a strong impact on the landscape evolution (urban, peri-urban and countryside). The text is composed of some general parts on the subject in question and some case studies (Italian, European and North American), always aiming to develop the theme of “quality”, both for the choice of the route at the territorial scale (the environmental impact study, the analysis and visual evaluation, the alternatives, the minimizations, etc.), and for the project or “site design” (the compatibility with the immediate surroundings, the works of art, the services, etc.). 

Sylvia Crowe stated that “roads are at the same time the most invasive of visible engineering structures, and the points of view from which we most often observe the countryside” and noting that fast-traffic roads generate “… the fascinating problem of composing a vision that is seen at speed …”.

Well, while the car journey as a pleasant experience typical of American parkways remains a point of reference for a design that considers visual-perceptive needs as one of the most important factors that a road must satisfy and that should have a substantial weight in the final choices, the functionalist cultural approach has produced a detachment of the infrastructure from the context making it self-referential, a closed system, making drawings and works of art prevail as an artificial quality opposed to the natural-landscape one: and this has also changed our perception of the landscape, no longer as “travelers” within a landscape, but as users of a function detached from the context, at most as “observers” extraneous to the places we pass through.