Coexistence
Stephanie Doll
/Oana-Theodora Stefan
From a leisure park to an Alpine factory
Land is a volatile resource, always interconnected with people, politics and economy. The valley of Engadine presents itself as a highly controversial intermingling of tourism, agriculture and unscathed landscape. Public, water and agriculture. All areconnected through and by land, all are exploiting land, all are consuming land, all exist without co-existing, in a seemingly leisure park. Given the future climatic changes that will occur in the near future, namely hyper-humid winters and extremely dry summers, we intend to use the water as new spine for the valley, to create an alpine factory which collects, cleans, stores and distributes water through the valley of Engadine.
The new water spine collects both the urban surface water, while also attaching itself to the existing water net, so as to redefine the irrigation method in the valley, as a low tech and sustainable alternative. We focused on the area of La Punt, as the sole point along the valley that doesnt interact with the revitalisation proojects already intended. The area is dominated only by grass monocultures, lacking in any vegetation and agricultural multi-purposefulness. The intervention consists of a series of storage and cleaning basins, that carve themselves out of the existing topography and are connected through a net of finely sculpted irrigation channels.
Coexistence allows for moments of interaction between all three actors along the basins, contoured in the landscape through denser pockets of vegetation. Coexistence reintroduces flora and fauna, both existing and new on site, thus endowing the valley with a new chromatic identity over each season. Coexistence aims at bringing togther agriculture, land and public in one coherent cycle, while emabling the flora and fauna to reinstate itself on the site.