INITIAL CONSIDERATIONS

By Marco Adriano Perletti

The motorway as a context
The Kilometro Rosso Science and Technology Park is a site intended to house the new premises of research institutes and businesses. Offices, laboratories, research and development centres will be located in the leafy green surroundings of an area covering approximately 400,000 sq m, part of which will be a park open to the public. The whole site overlooks and extends alongside the A4 motorway. Even more so than the surrounding towns and villages, Kilometro Rosso has a direct relationship with this strip of road, which is thus acknowledged as the key element in an urban area that is strongly influenced by traffic flows. The A4 is much more than a simple motorway. It is the traffic backbone which runs lengthways across the so-called “ Megalopoli padana” (Po Valley Megalopolis) - the large urbanised area which has developed to gradually encompass the whole of northern Italy. The A4 is remarkable for the incredible mass of built-up areas which have gradually grown either side of it, over time. Unlike the situation in the early days (the Milan-Bergamo stretch was opened in 1927), the economic boom of the Sixties led to a process of atomisation of urban areas. This resulted in a collage of buildings, intermingled with residual manmade remnants, which became more and more densely packed around the motorway guard-rails. While it must be recognised that the A4 does not interact with the environment that it travels through, and is antithetical to the very concept of the city as “civitas” , the densely built-up areas crowd around it as though it were a city thoroughfare. The link that it provides between the main towns and industrial areas (and the lack of an alternative mode of transport) makes it the route that thousands of commuters take back and forth each day, and the chosen path of the new “placeless” social tribes who use it in their free time to get to theme parks, the lake shores, bars and night clubs.
In order to get a feel for this aspect, simply get into a car and go through the toll booths. From this mobile position one can observe a landscape that unravels the morphology of the scattered city of the Po valley, like a TV documentary. The motorway lanes give off that ambiguous and sublime force that holds together and nourishes an endless continuum. It is an anomalous landscape that contains within it all the elements in the imagination of the city-dweller who is inured to car travel and is used to no longer being able to tell the city apart from the countryside; used to seeing a large factory alongside a rubbish tip; a barn next to a shopping mall; an incinerator next to a disco: placeless objects in the sprawl of the megalopolis, which project their image for fractions of a minute onto the glass surfaces of car windows, like frames in a bizarrely edited film. Or rather, like clips seen out of context when zapping across TV channels, or the destructured technique beloved of the well-known Italian programme, Blob.

The view from the car window
For a deeper understanding of the potential of an architectural development like Kilometro Rosso, which stands alongside a motorway, it is useful to consider the theme of visual perception in movement.
When travelling on a motorway, the only contact between the driver and the surrounding context is the view offered by the car window. This phenomenon has been well-known for some time now in the field of design disciplines. It became an object of cultural attention in the Sixties thanks to Kevin Lynch and the theory he described in “The View from the Road”; this identified the view from the road as having analytical and design potential that had thus far been untapped. Lynch’s studies gave voice to the poetics of the highway, and radically shifted the observation point of the metropolis; he identified the driver as the privileged subject of this new knowledge.
Among the few cases in which Lynch’s theories have been applied in Italy, special mention should go to the Lombardy Region’s Studies for the Regional Landscape Plan. The specific purpose of this research was to find a method for simulating and analysing the views generated along main roads. It examined the “perceptibility” of the surrounding area in the stretch of the A4 between the River Adda and the city of Bergamo (the same stretch of motorway along which the Kilometro Rosso is located). A series of investigations analysed the conical visual field through which the driver sees the landscape from the moving car. The choice of which road to test took into account the high degree of complexity of the surrounding area, as well as the undoubtedly interesting landscape, with the pre-alpine backdrop of the Orobie mountains and the spectacular sight of Bergamo’s Città Alta (Upper Town) on its hill. It is interesting to notice how the study considered the view from a motorway as a value in human experience, to be weighted when making planning and design choices; and consequently proclaimed the significance of the observation of the urban form from a moving car, recognising the infrastructure as an important position from which to view the landscape.
Today we can say that the visual experience provided by travelling along the A4, while hardly a work of art, is undoubtedly a “show”, presented like a communication system, a cross-section of signs that recall what Robert Venturi, less emphatically than Lynch, observed along the Strip in Las Vegas. Its semiotic complexity, the chaos of signs and advertising hoardings and the overexposure to media can be linked, although they must be distinguished from it, to what the American architect held up as the paradigmatic case that can teach us to read and understand the composite urban context and its symbolic aspect. His analysis of Nevada’s casino city showed for the first time the relationship between the scale of the urban space, the building, road travel, the symbol and the commercial signs. He emblematically highlighted the relationship between signs/speed/perception which led to considerable repercussions on the form of architecture, the city and the landscape in metropolitan areas. The media power of the A4 is one possible form of relationship with the semiotic chaos of Las Vegas. This strip for travel presents its surroundings to thousand of eyes, and could be compared to a region-wide shopping arcade or better still, to a sequence of intermittent advertisements flickering across the TV screen. It is a means of communication with a series of potential uses that must be considered constructively and positively as interacting factors, together with others, that will determine the outward form of architecture designed for the general public.

Image + content
The problems and strengths drawn from the tricky relationship between the motorway and built-up areas create expectations which the Kilometro Rosso project seeks to fulfil. The project for the new park asks questions on how architecture can positively interact with the infrastructure, in its mission to improve the space in which people live. On the one hand, the project considers reasons linked to the aesthetic experience of perception from the car window (the image) and on the other, those linked to the creation of a space suitable for people to inhabit (the content). The first aspect leads to an idea of architecture that is modelled, among other things, on appearing attractive to traffic flow on the motorway. If the eye watching from the car sees the landscape as a film sequence, the architecture of Kilometro Rosso presents itself as an active part of this experience, through its form. With regard to the second aspect, the project considers the motorway as a factor which conditions its own typological principle. While recognising the critical aspects of the motorway, it creates the conditions for redressing the balance between humankind and technology, between the machine and nature: from this perspective, architecture makes its greatest contribution by creating the spatial conditions whereby new inhabited places can be built out of non-places for fast transit.
These initial considerations form the basis of the masterplan draw up by the Jean Nouvel studio, which was assisted in operational coordination by the Blast studio. The masterplan presents a basic architectural layout: a red lamellar metal wall runs alongside the motorway for a kilometre, becoming the architectural scenario behind which the various research buildings are arranged at right angles in the park.
The principle of the wall gives a clear interpretation of the theme of demarcation and the city limit, which simultaneously separates and joins together the space around it. The long partition is a linear sign that relates the non-space of the motorway with the place of the science park. This is why it is destined to become a point of comparison between “opposite poles”: the world of the car and the world of people; the speed of vehicles and the slowness of the body; the uniformity of the red wall and the variedness of the green park; the noise of the cars and the silence of the trees. As it stretches across a kilometre it becomes a sort of device, transforming its functional nature into something which serves the inhabited space. It becomes a screen between the car-park area and the buildings in the park, a sound barrier protecting against the air and noise pollution of the motorway and – as it grows wider – a pedestrian corridor.
But in giving shape to the city limit, Nouvel also indulges the appeal of the Muse of speed who dwells in our time: as he said in an interview, “there is a poetics of the asphalt”, and “those who travel on the motorway are also part of this contemporary poetry”. Playing with this unusual “aesthetic dimension”, he creates a dramatic looking architecture with a radical appearance that attracts the gazes of drivers: an architecture that is mindful of the American lessons of Lynch and Venturi. Although it is expressed with a very different layout and form, this project demonstrates its conceptual descent from Le Corbusier’s Olivetti centre; that was a manufacturing complex that was designed (and unfortunately never built) near the Rho motorway exit. It featured plastic forms that were designed to be seen by thousands of passers-by in their cars. The red-painted thousand metres are intentionally an architectural symbol that conveys a clean, emblematic image to fast traffic: by breaking the jumbled sequence one picks up when driving along the A4, the red kilometre will appear as a uniform interruption: a drastic, spectacular interval that will contrast with the discontinuity of its surroundings. Its vast size, together with the colour, which evokes the world of cars and speed, will stand out, captivating the gaze and causing that “surprise” on which architecture is founded, according to the Parisian architect.
Thus Kilometro Rosso seeks to express new forms of living in the contemporary kinetic space. In doing so, it pursues a way of possibly combining aims – financial, formal, environmental – which often conflict with each other in the architectural process. The long partition decorating the motorway is only the most obvious interface of a complex, structured programme which attempts to maintain the prerequisite of technological innovation as the basis for all choices made. Innovative, experimental techniques and materials have been used, and solar power, photovoltaic and geothermal systems have been installed to meet the energy requirements of the buildings. These are just some of the many planning solutions, understated but no less important for it, involved in an architectural project which stands out for the seductive quality of its image.