YUL-MTL | MOVING LANDSCAPES INTERNATIONAL IDEAS COMPETITION
Fertile Infrastructure, beyond scenography | Honorable Mention
Designers: Laura Cipriani, Francesca Arici; collaborator: Leonardo Zuccaro Marchi; graphic: Igor Kuseta, Adriano Riosa, Emili Medica; video: Alberto Scalcon
What would happen if water and transport infrastructures would become a green, sustainable, fertile spine for the future development of Montreal city? Besides dealing with visual features of the corridor, Fertile Infrastructures proposes a new operational landscape which addresses several liabilities of the site. While creating a scene, such infrastructural landscape also creates a new and more sustainable urban setting, more corresponding to Montreal’s center vitality and diversity.
The role of infrastructures is therefore reversed from one that disconnects to one that colonizes and resolves the spaces around it, conquering and re-using any left over space, revitalizing, reprogramming, remediating, and providing a whole new sense to that piece of territory. A series of devices are spread by the oozing infrastructures and compose the new mosaic of the corridor. Some of them are found in place – the hidden rivers, the railway lines, the containers, the “brutalism” of the infrastructural concrete, etc. – and the project just sheds a new light on them. Some reprogramme or re-distribute the existing features (snow, green roofs, urban agriculture, built heritage, landmarks, Lachine canal, existing vegetation, earth works..) and by doing so they re-paint the significance of the interested spaces.
Some are entirely new, and are fed into the ground to address specific issues: the reconnecting eco-bridges that link isolated communities, the green acoustic tubes that protect residents from noise while greening the landscape, the run-off treatment by phyto-remediation that avoid pollution and contain floods, Turcot sound park that pushes the infrastructural nature of the massive interchange, the porous and colored asphalt that increases permeability, the new buildings at Turcot Yard and at Dorval which provide respectively new residential and new parking space for residents and visitors of Montreal). All of them play an active role in addressing the liabilities and reversing them in new assets and potentials for the whole city.
All these devices, finally, give birth to a whole new image of the corridor, a figure made of flowers, drops and materialized energy flows, which can be perceived at the different scales and from the different points of view of the different infrastructural lines (autoroutes, railway, canal, bikepaths). A new territorial identity is created, an identity that can be perceived as early as by the Montreal’s resident or visitor landing at Trudeau Airport from his airplane’s window. This is the new “view from the sky”, Kevin Lynch would say.
