One possible future for Grande Dixence

IPCC reports stop their predictions in 2100. An abrupt line in eighty years from now. Yet infrastructure, including buildings last for longer than that: what we build now is the heritage we will have to deal with when we reach that line. As such, engineers and architects have a responsibility for the people of today but especially for the people of tomorrow. We are obsessed by our current «situation», our current context, but we somehow still sugarcoat the issues at hand in our main discourses. To understand the issues creating our current and future context in greater depth, the theoretical statement – Stories of the future | stories of now: responding to disruptions : resilience, imagination and architecture – focussed on many topics ranging from environemental changes, inequalities, societal lock ins, and energy return to approches towards resilience: all under the lense of societally shared narratives and stories. This leads to the understanding that engineers and architects not only have the responsibility but also the tools to adress those challenges: especially through the power of imagination and projecting... To concretise this vision into a project, the broad water catchement area of the Grande Dixence infrastructure was chosen for its strong place in the locally shared mythology. One of its possible futures is then projected: 200 years from now, how will the land, the soil, the people, the infrastructure, the water and the culture be used and changed? One imagined possible future to reflect and think. Because we have to.