Vincent Callebaut Architectures, Landscript Ecological Master Plan, aerial view © Vincent Callebaut Architectures

Vincent Callebaut Architectures | Landscript Ecological Master Plan

As the Genevan cantonal politics opens finally on a « future without frontiers », the Landscript project integrates itself in a logic of laboratory to make denser before 2020 a marginal area of 220 hectares maximum, dedicated until now exclusively to industrial activities. “A minimum of free spaces for a maximum of dual spaces”, this is the objective of the project. It deals with a urban recycling phenomenon at high density, typical problem of our European post-industrial revolution which have to transform the old periphery into a new transfunctional central space. In this context, we have deliberately integrated the project in a global evolution of the Lemanic territory and of the two elements marking the mountains and the water. The landscape superimposes itself on the industrial and train infrastructures remained intact and thu rebuilds itself truly on the city.

Vincent Callebaut Architectures, Landscript Ecological Master Plan, housing model © Vincent Callebaut Architectures

Landscript proposes an evolution scenario on the fifteen next years which is based on a new auto cloning phenomenon of the landscape. Indeed, the concept of the project comes from the territorial genes in order to restore an equilibrated ecosystem between the built magma and a rediscovered biodiversity. The site, located in a alluvial plain and bordered by a moraine coming from the retreat of the glacier, lost all its territorial history. This is a good example of invasion of the landscape by the concrete cover of the industrial city. There is no more vegetation now inside the site! For more than 15 000 years, the site has been forged and modelled by the power of the water and the glacial moraine. The water, essential element of the Genevan landscape, does not irrigate anymore the territory in surface. Landsript proposes to restore these aquatic flows open-cast which interlace themselves between the viaducts of the Jeunes freeway. The lake’s contours are redrawn in order to welcome the historical project of the river harbour linked to the buckle of the railroad so as to create a true multimodal pole of entertainment in the centre of the city.

Vincent Callebaut Architectures, Landscript Ecological Master Plan, study model © Vincent Callebaut Architectures

Landscript represents the third step of the worldwide urban evolution. Indeed, after having built the city on the landscape, the landscape rebuilt itself on the city! In this perspective, all the buildings are considered as abstractions of the geographies and distortions of ecosystems. Sometimes cocoons, atolls or  inhabited mountains, they absorb the activities which did not know how to impregnate themselves of the landscape. In the centre of the project, the inhabited mountains are set up directly on the Jeunes freeway which takes currently away all the possibilities of a continuous nature. It is a new geography genetically modified of water and mountains that integrates all the programmation of the public equipments by mixing them to the housings and to the secondary and tertiary activities.

Vincent Callebaut Architectures, Landscript Ecological Master Plan, social equipments © Vincent Callebaut Architectures

These architectures, with organic silhouettes merging with the natural landscape, are auto sufficient in the view of the current research to the long lasting development. That is the reason why they product their own energy (by biogas, photovoltaic cells and wind mill energy), recycle their waste (by bio burning and  bacterial beds) and their used waters by natural filtration in purification stations and lagoons.

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