Infrastructure, Architecture and Context

To all intents and purposes, an infrastructure project is also a project for the whole area on which that infrastructure will impinge.

The changes brought about by a linear infrastructure like a railway are vast and will last until the facility is decommissioned. Importantly, therefore, the inevitable landscape reconfiguration that will occur with the arrival of the new construction must not bring about irreversible changes to the original identity of the area.

Any new infrastructure has far reaching public interest implications that often see national or supranational interests clash with local concerns and assets. Hence the even greater importance for an infrastructure project compared with a single architecture programme to develop a planning approach that effectively takes into account the landscape, the built world and the social stakes involved in the area to be traversed by, say, a railway line, to ensure that the inevitable transformation becomes a means of highlighting the region’s special features. If achieved, this would definitively do away with the mitigation and compensation mechanisms that have become part and parcel of infrastructural planning and development but which testify to a failure to prevent or minimise damage that once produced can only be attenuated, concealed or compensated.

Projects must adapt to the specificity of place. Their language must be in keeping with the particular characteristics of a region. The more prized an environment, the greater should be the effort to harmonise the infrastructure, its materials forms and colour palette with its surrounds.

Although infrastructure may use different materials, disciplines and technologies than architecture, both must comply with functional and aesthetic requirements if they are to express a pleasing overall aesthetic.

A pleasing aesthetic is all the more necessary in certain contexts outside of Italy where the landscapes change...