South of Geneva, Switzerland, the River Aire runs across a plain that for centuries has been agricultural land. From the late 19th century, the waterway has been embanked for flood protection, also causing the gradual loss of habitat for a large variety of plants and animals. In 2001, decisions were taken to re-naturalise the river. Yet rather than to merely reconstruct its former natural bed, Superpositions, the association of firms commissioned with the project, applied ‘topographic imagination’, a method termed by American landscape designer Elissa Rosenberg. It combines the embanked channel with a newly designed pasture landscape. The channel indicates a work in progress and serves as a reference line that makes ‘before’ and ‘after’ traceable. This new book documents this much recognised, award-winning re-naturalisation project with drawings, images of construction work and of the new waterway. Essays and comments by international contributors Jean-Marc Besse, Lorette Coen, Gerorges Descombes, G. Mathias Kondolf, Elissa Rosenberg, Gilles A. Tiberghien, and Marc Treib demonstrate how the restored River Aire has been upgraded to become again a characteristic feature of this landscape on the fringe of the city.
Text in English, French and German.
AUTHORS: Georges Descombes is an architect and landscape designer, and a professor of architecture at University of Geneva. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Amsterdam’s Berlage Institut, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and at University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Julien Descombes is an architect and landscape designer and co-founder of Atelier Descombes Rampini in Geneva. Corinne Van Cauwenberghe is a civil engineer and a director with B+C Engineers in Geneva. Vincent Correnti is a civil engineer and head of underground and road construction with ZS Ingenieurs civils in Geneva. Francois Gerber works as an environmental engineer with BIOTEC Biologie appliquee in Delemont, Switzerland.
60 colour, 216 b/w illustrations