Geneva 2020

For our second installment of Vincent Callebaut’s work, we bring you his Geneva 2020 masterplan – the ‘Landscript’ project. The masterplan is for a [roughly] 220 hectares[about 2.2 square kilometers] area on the outskirts of the city that is currently used for industrial purposes – and therefore is in need of a green shift.

The goal of the project is described by Callebaut as ‘a minimum of free spaces for a maximum of dual spaces’, in the hopes of creating as many multi purpose spaces as possible – in order to reduce building footprints/impact on the surrounding environment. This newly created landscape, which would house 100,000 new city dwellers, ’superimposes’ itself over the preexisting industrial infrastructure [trains, roads, etc] – further diminishing it’s impact.

The general planning relies heavily upon the history of the site – alluvial plains and moraines from glacial movement in the area – and recreates the rolling hills, steams, and lagoons. The actual construction is broken into two types; one being ‘egg’ shaped, and seen as similar to our current building practices, seems to be used as the transitional building type between the existing city and the ‘Landscript’ plan. The second building type on the site works to rebuild the hill landscape, and contains a mixture of every program needed by the residents – schools, daycares, universities, theaters, museums, shopping malls – in order to create a self sufficient community. Conceptually, theses ‘hill’ structures are meant to show a final merging of man’s construction and nature:

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.

The project builds on the idea of self sufficient and ‘natural’ urban environments by copying natural processes to meet the needs of the program and inhabitants. The buildings produce their own energy through biogas, photovoltaic cells and wind turbine energy, recycle their waste by means of bio burning and bacterial beds, and use natural filtration & purification stations and lagoons to purify their own waste water.

These bulbous living structures allow for the park-like ground plain to pass right beneath them – even leaving the core of the building open [where have we seen this before?] to the sky, as if these buildings themselves are a man made forest of housing units.

All images from Vincent Callebaut Architectures

Source: Oursuprisingworld