Routes Nationales Suisses

Sierre-Viège, Switzerland

The project of the competition for a new section of the road that connects the towns of Sierre and Visp (about 30 km), organized by Swiss National Roads, became the occasion to think not only about infrastructures but also about a general revaluation of the villages the road passes through. It is a research work about simplicity that endeavours to eliminate any dispensable element and to intensify the perception of the environment – may it be natural or constructed.

This search of the essential is worked out in every scale of the project, from the insertion in the landscape to the defining of architectonic solutions, emphasizing a possible dialogue between man, landscape and roads.
Carefully planned in its surrounding as if it were a design object, the road does no longer need to be hidden in the landscape. On the contrary it is accentuated by subtle solutions tending to lighten its materia and heaviness even trying to transform it into an abstract element in the countryside and so to set off an intellectual statement indicating that to emphasize the landscape does not always mean to get confused in it.