A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Tunneling through Urban Modernity
A tunnel is a simple and utilitarian transport artefact in the modern city. As a typological element it offers a universal solution in the systematic ordering of segregated modes in urban transportation systems. Yet, it is an urban artefact unlike most; one, that is experienced from within, through its very enclosure performing powerful intensities on everyday life atmospheric landscapes. The article brings forth an embodied encounter with a 1973 concrete-cast underpass in a modernist suburb in Denmark. In the situated confrontation with the cool concrete container the tunnel is inhabited on the move from within. At this scale of the body, the tunnel as a pure instrument for transport is challenged. Through inhabitation - upon recognition of the situated, embodied experience - the tunnel unfolds as a powerful and ambivalent urban space, magnifying the atmospheric intensities of urban absences and presences. Here, the event of space is potent, and people in flow cannot avoid the intensity of coalescing with other people and things in a space of proximity. The situated encounter conveys the tunnel as a frame of view into the dream of the modern, frictionless city. In the tunnel the dream of seamless modernity is manifested in concrete and asphalt. But the modernist dream collapses in there. The illusion of frictionless physical space is superseded by urban reality: the tunnel space is filled with the intensity of friction, with old-fashioned sensorial and social ambiguity and common disorder of the city.
Tunneling through Urban Modernity
A tunnel is a simple and utilitarian transport artefact in the modern city. As a typological element it offers a universal solution in the systematic ordering of segregated modes in urban transportation systems. Yet, it is an urban artefact unlike most; one, that is experienced from within, through its very enclosure performing powerful intensities on everyday life atmospheric landscapes. The article brings forth an embodied encounter with a 1973 concrete-cast underpass in a modernist suburb in Denmark. In the situated confrontation with the cool concrete container the tunnel is inhabited on the move from within. At this scale of the body, the tunnel as a pure instrument for transport is challenged. Through inhabitation - upon recognition of the situated, embodied experience - the tunnel unfolds as a powerful and ambivalent urban space, magnifying the atmospheric intensities of urban absences and presences. Here, the event of space is potent, and people in flow cannot avoid the intensity of coalescing with other people and things in a space of proximity. The situated encounter conveys the tunnel as a frame of view into the dream of the modern, frictionless city. In the tunnel the dream of seamless modernity is manifested in concrete and asphalt. But the modernist dream collapses in there. The illusion of frictionless physical space is superseded by urban reality: the tunnel space is filled with the intensity of friction, with old-fashioned sensorial and social ambiguity and common disorder of the city.
Tunneling through Urban Modernity
Ditte Bendix Lanng (author) / Tina Vestermann Olsen (author) / Simon Wind (author)
2022
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
Unknown
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