Roundabouts and City Limits: The Agency of Visual Phenomena

This contribution proposal is based on a photographic campaign I have conducted over the last years on the borders of the Paris metropolitan and more specifically on the science campus located on the agricultural plateau of Saclay. It is supplemented with an analysis of both implicit and explicit roadbuilding normative standards I am now conducting as first step of my PHD research. Like most of the most of the traffic devices that modern road design practices have introduced in the non-dense urban territories, the roundabout is often regarded as being an impediment to urbanity. Indeed, considering its formal aspect, the roundabout implies intense and discontinuous land consumption. Associated with strict programmatic zoning and separation of traffic flows, it generates spatial and programmatic segregation. Considering its functional aspect, it increases fluidity and security of car traffic flow, precluding sensory interactions with the surrounding context. Beyond its material and technical rationality, the roundabout is implemented with untouchable ornaments, often considered as kitsch. Its esthetical aspect is thus based on top-down territorial branding strategies. Being composed of a highly visible green space, it also has a strong non-urban connotation. However, its ancestor, the “rond-point”, was formerly used in forest landscape design to articulate the collective hunting practices and visual sequences of bridle paths. Then it became the backbone of city’s extension plans for the “embellissement des villes”, during the first modernity of the 18th century. Today, even if the modern roundabout has little to do with what the traditional public square used to be, it is still a landmark for the driver: it signals the exit from the highway network, the entrance in the urbanized area and the immediate proximity of industrial and commercial zones. Despite its triviality, the roundabout is thus related to the expression of city limits, which are not any more embodied in a single unitary device. Which role does the roundabout play then in the spatial, social and symbolic emergence of urbanity? To understand and evaluate the monumental dimension of such a traffic device, it seams necessary to consider not only the material aspects, the social uses or the discourses that underpin its design, but also the dynamic interactions between the user and the built environment. Herein, the sophisticated visual phenomena generated by the roundabout are quite informative. Making the car flow rotate around an inaccessible platform that is vegetated as an idealized piece of nature, this perfectly circular device disorientates the driver and immerses him into the road network. We can observe then how the roundabout involves a special cognition of the urban footprint – usually symbolized by a circular surface in the European culture, as opposed to its supposedly natural limit. In this purpose, we will make a comparison with another circular device that belongs to the spectacular domain: the painted panorama in the 19th century, which played an important role in the evolution of urban and territorial representations at the time of the mergence of metropolises, during the first industrial revolution. The aim of this proposed contribution is to consider how the visual phenomena generated by the technical and normed roundabout device contribute to the current redefinition of the “urban” and the “natural”. It also aims to discuss about the agency of what may be called the urban landscape or image, compared to the one of the physical built environment.

Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Nancy Raewyn Couling

Ocean space is currently being urbanized on an unprecedented scale, a phenomenon under investigation by the architectural laboratoire bâle, EPFL Switzerland. Lefebvre writes of the all-encompassing process of urbanization, that agriculture, industry and urbanization follow each other (Lefebvre 2003). This model can be tested for ocean space, which already plays a major role within mobility and organisational networks and is at the same time a fluid, partially industrialised landscape of dimensions often far exceeding comparable zones on land. The research aims to investigate these relationships, position ocean spatial typologies within the urban debate and identify planning tools informed by the physical, as opposed to the virtual, condition of flow, which implement the ocean itself as an “active” agent. In the case of the Barents Sea in northern Norway, the interest in ocean space is fuelled by the opening of the Northern Sea Route to Asia and the prospect of releasing vast off-shore reserves of oil & gas on the one hand, and the alarming rate of global warming as reflected in the receding ice-front on the other. The strategic development of infrastructure, the provision of access and the complex grid of international networks active in the region are indicators of a particular type of urbanism acting at the territorial scale. This specific character, however, demands an urbanism of flows. Despite its remoteness, its vastness, its extreme climatic and light conditions, its relatively sparse human population and its abundance of natural habitats, this territory is under extreme pressure. The Barents Sea exemplifies the need for a new kind of spatial strategy, a strategy which works with the dynamics of the ocean and its potential for the current urbanization processes. How can urban design methods and principles be applied to ocean territory and how can natural “clients” such as inhabitants, or phenomena such as ice, be catered for in planning terms? The laboratory’s project developed “territorial constitutions” for the Barents Sea which were then further articulated in singular architectural projects as a proof of concept. The context revealed itself to be both an extremely harsh and aesthetic natural environment and a correspondingly extreme artificial and utilitarian built environment.

2014

Le vide

Stephanie Bender

Today the question of how to work in the continuous contemporary urban landscape, is a big concern for urban development professionals. Still marked by the modern obsession to define the building forms, a vision influenced by the functionalist movement of the Thirties, these same professionals have lost their means of working sustainably in a contemporary city which is both continuous and fragmented, like an individualised collection of various materials and shapes without urban links, spreading out without limits in the overall landscape. In this chaos, an urban approach has appeared, changing the interest from the building to its landscape, from the built to the non-built, and above all from the filled to the void, and offers a new approach more adapted to the context of today's urban environment, capable of creating links with the non built, of offering new urban materials through the 'non urban', and generating public spaces in the presence of 'non-form' buildings. This approach, which here is called The void. New urban strategies, works with the 'non-materials' such as the landscape, the infrastructure or the programmes, and tries to meet the challenge of a new urbanism in the contemporary city. To understand this, the thesis will strive to explore the chronology of this idea through its different chapters. A 'prehistory' will provide an understanding of the origins of this, via its discoverers, pioneers and precursors and will present an astonishing picture of first attempts to define the urban environment via the void. The case of Melun-Senart, the urban strategy developed in 1987 by Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), considered as the starting point for this search and as the masterpiece of the Void approach, will demonstrate the extremely innovative phenomena which resulted from what it called by its author as the "Strategy of the void". Putting this into perspective in the work of Rem Koolhaas will reveal a dense web of projects and writings on, or with the void, which again reinforces the idea of its pertinence. The exploration of the artistic fields and parallel philosophies, will demonstrate the pre-existence of the 'void' concepts amongst the protagonists and will prove the huge influence that they had in the construction of this new urban idea for the architects and the urban planners, and in particular Koolhaas. Finally, other contemporary urban protagonists will illustrate through their projects and their writings, a variety of approaches for the void up to the present day. And right at the end, an experiment through the void projects of the author, will offer an introspective vision of the process. More than two decades after the 'Strategy of the void' this approach goes beyond the diagrammatic stage of a competition, confirming not only its pertinence, but also its ability to provide answers that are both varied and renewed to the extremely complex and confused situations that are to be found in today's urban environment. This new way of conceptualising the urban landscape by the void, the reference for the dense area of the historical city, is replaced by the informal void of the contemporary city considered as the very identity of this new continuous urbanism and shows itself ultimately to be the void. a new urban strategy.

EPFL2011

Alexandre Sarrasin (1895-1976) et l'esthétique de l'ingénieur

Philippe Mivelaz

Alexandre Sarrasin (1895-1976) studied at Zürich Federal Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) from 1913 to 1918. Despite First World War's conflicts surrounding the neutral Switzerland, the intellectual climate inside ETH was cosmopolitan and liberal. As unique educational institution directly depending from the Federal government, the ETH played an important role in shaping modern Switzerland where country planning and infrastructure building were the central power's main tasks. Engineers were important figures of this process of modernization. They embodied the values of the industrial revolution: rationality, efficiency and the huge power of transformation of the country and its society. Sarrasin opened an engineer's office in Lausanne in 1921 and in Brussell two years later. He established himself in the capital of Belgium in 1927 while ruling at the same time his office in Lausanne. He came back to Switzerland when the German army invaded Belgium. The office in Bruxells was maintained up to the early 1960's. Branches were opened in Sion and Geneva during the 1950's. Sarrasin's work concerned foundations, buildings, bridges and some dams also. Nearly all these constructions works were made of reinforced concrete, his favorite material. This thesis is dedicated to the construction works, especially the bridges in Valais, Sarrasin's native district, and the aesthetic question in engineer's design. Of the bridge of Branson (1924- 1925) near Fully, his first important commission, he wrote that "The elegance of the design is due to its simplicity. The quietness of its lines is fully harmonized with the landscape. Nothing was planned for the decoration. The bridge is the simple realization of a mathematical truth". This quotation highlights the issue of form for engineers and especially in Sarrasin's works: the affirmation of simplicity and "mathematical truth", that is to say the expression of the structural mechanics, as the engineer's aesthetic's fundamental the relation with the landscape The question of form was not only thought of in terms of efficiency and economy, or lack of decoration. The development of structural mechanics as engineer's science gave new conceptual tools allowing new designs. The first professor of civil engineering at the ETH, Karl Culmann (1821-1881), was the graphical static's father. This applied science was inspired by descriptive geometry and graphical calculation methods developed in France during the 18th and 19th century. To the construction's classical point of view distinguishing between elements bearing weight (for example pillars) and others being supported (for example lintels), graphical static opposed a spatial vision of forces interactions into the structure. New materials allowed bringing these forces into play with tensed cables, compressed or extended frames. At the beginning of the 20th century, reinforced concrete appeared as modern material along side with iron and steel. Created by builders in the 19th century, its construction method was investigated by engineers making it a universal material used by everyone, independent of patents. This assimilation was made by elaborating construction norms that had sometimes inhibitive effects on the creativity of engineers. Other engineer looked for new forms fitting the material's caracteristics. Robert Maillart (1872-1940) was one of them. He had a great influence on Sarrasin's work. The first half-century of modern engineers which started with the creation of the ETH in 1855, was a period of great innovations in science and technology. Most construction works were made of metal and were built for the railways and designed with the graphical static, creating a new architecture, but the question of aesthetic became an issue only at the beginning of the 20th century. The first reaction rose against the overwhelming presence of technology in surroundings : its impact on the landscape or on the city's image was depicted as negative. At the same time, other observers – architects, art historians – recognized in industrial constructions an aesthetical value. Some engineers wanted a come back to traditional forms as stone vaults. During the first quarter of century, several metallic bridges had been considered as fragile and replaced by stone works. Bridges were designed as monuments. On the other side, some engineers argued for the beauty of modern materials and technology, opposed to the picturesque point of view, represented by those who wanted preserving the landscape. The First World War was not only the beginning of the 20th century. It seemed also to be the moment where engineers lost their innocence. Aesthetical questions and the impact on the landscape were matters of public debates. During the same period engineering became a profession free of contractors. That had probably the effect that engineers developed their own language. Sarrasin exactly spent his study years during this period of changes. Matters of aesthetic belonged to the themes treated by his professor of structural mechanics, Arthur Rohn (1878- 1956), who considered that a bridge should not only be built rationally, but should also express his structural system. François Schüle (1860-1925), who was involved in developing constructive norms for reinforced concrete, was his professor of material's technology. He represented the scientific side of the profession of engineer. The works of Sarrasin embodied this double requirement for rationality in using materials and the will to integrate the construction works into the landscape and into the environmental context. Valais was the landscape taken into account. This mountainous district entailed contradictory representations of the need of modernization and the preservation of landscape and traditions. On one side, this region was shown as a society preserved from modernity with unchanged traditions, on the other side, the Valais quickly took part in the national economy. The landscape changed deeply with the draining of the main valley of the Rhône river, the construction of rail and road nets, industry and hydroelectric plants. Sarrasin's works were the products of this economic revolution which transformed the Valais region; they wanted at the same time to be a testimony of this story. One of the interesting aspects of the attitude of this engineer is the way he used references to ancient constructions. Beamers and arches reconsidered in respect with modern technology by use of reinforced concrete, created a dialogue with the landscape or with stoned vaults thrown upon the Alps deep abysses.

EPFL2007