Lido as Terrain Vague
Benjanmín Brádňanský and Vít Halada

In the summer semester of the 2020 academic year, students of the dva/ja studio of the Department of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava dedicated their time and attention to the territory on Bratislava’s right bank of the Danube River. The aim was to understand the meaning of the existence of the seemingly unused and abandoned zone stretching along the Danube River and to elaborate a project related to its one specific section – Lido. The following text contains the initiative’s prologue as well as examples of individual interventions.



Terrain Vague.



Cities are products of concentration, excessive production and specialization. They allow people to be involved in activities which are not directly connected with the production of basic needs.  Cities were created as human constructs and designated for human habitation. The non-human and off-human in cities serve people (gardens, parks) or are byproduct of abandonment, neglect or non-human occupation.  The climate crisis and pandemic have forced us to think about how we should design and inhabit this construct.  However, even with all the goodwill of this activity, in the long run it appears to be harmful for the environment we live in and eventually even for mankind as such. It is gradually becoming more obvious that the process of fighting the natural environment cannot continue; natural processes must permitted even in places where they were previously lacking or closely controlled and limited.



Even today, cities have such blind spots where they lost or never gained control.  Efforts are being made to transform such places into “human” ones, which may and most probably will lead to the annihilation of many specific types of natural processes as well as spots for the creation of activities for privileged social groups.



We have studied such a territory where the city and the river meet. In order to be able to give it a name and understand it, we will use the definition of vagueness, from the still topical text Terrain Vague by Ignasi de Solá-Morales.  



Terrain vague is a quality which we strive to preserve and ironically even develop.



These apparently weak spots contain many non-anthropocentric qualities which have the potential to enrich our abstract architectural thinking as well as the way we think about cities, but to especially contribute to the fact that cities will become not only a concentration of human environments, but those of the non-human, off-human or marginally human environments. Accepting such diversity seems to be crucial for the survival of many species, including our own.



We will explore whether this is even possible in the current town planning setting. What are the qualities of a terrain vague (TV)? And what is a TV to us? And to the extent that a TV is acceptable, how to protect it from humanization and develop it and how can architecture learn from it. These and many other questions form the basis for directing the thinking in the student projects and initiation essay, which are a reaction to Sorales’s text and observations from his actual and virtual visits to LIDO and the Petržalka banks of the  Danube.



Sorales’s text serves as optics for architectural students looking at a specific place. The essay should be a non-spatial instrument for the visual capturing of atmospheres, phenomena, space and behaviors. The following spatial axonometric depiction is, to various degrees, an attempt to plot, map and geometrize the vague. Individual projects have been looked for in joint online tutorials without any further physical presence at the site, from the heretofore unexperienced quarantine environment of “safe” households. The phenomenal terrain vague was conceptualized and observed through its available parts rather than its holistic perception.  

TV POTENTIAL

Natural processes are among the possible and solid qualities of the TV which appeared during the tutorials.  Students were challenged to direct their project towards developing these processes and their analogies and transferring them to architecture. The topic of the naturalness of the natural in the TV, accidentality, suitability, cultivation, time, effort to gain control, protection and artificial support up to the creation of a not serving but “pumped up” fourth artificial nature.

The battle between the natural and urban was a repeated feature or interpretation of spatial relations in the TV. The temporal succession of habitation and the cultivation of nature. Nature and its occasional or regular occupation of the territory in the form of floods, permanent and unstoppable returns of the alluvial forest, wetlands as well as the emergent occurrence of a third nature. The testing of social programs of an economic, military, leisure and sporting variety, infrastructurally designed following the top-down model, initiated from below or occurring and initiated up to the super promoted by contemporary capital. Is this a battle for something that needs to be resolved, stopped, settled once and for all? Must  there be a winner and loser? Can this trench warfare and digging in of positions be transformed into a dynamic exchange and the appearance of new qualities, hybrid environments?

Uninhabitability is another quality that arose; the TV is too wild, dangerous and scary. It is no place for the individual’s instinctive fear of the power of nature. It is too close to the safely scrubbed urban environment. In fact, it is full of uncertainty and paranoia of the possible, the hidden, the non-urban or off-urban and unknown.  But is it necessary to be rid of such qualities? We don’t want to turn a lion to domestic cat, nor do we intend to tame it for a circus or break it for a zoo. Can a city include an environment that is not for everyone? And what limits and rules should it apply? Can a wilderness be architecturalized?

Terrain vague as an architectural assignment.

When architecture and town planning project their desire for free space and unclear terrain, it seems that they are able to do nothing but introduce forced transformations, change social estrangement into citizenship and strive to dissolve the uncontaminated magic of the redundant into effective reality at any price.  If we were to use the current terminology in aesthetics, which is the basis of Gilles Deleuze’s way of thinking, architecture is forever on the side of forms, visible and figurative, and keeps its distance while the broken individuality of the inhabitants of the contemporary city searches for powers instead of forms, instead of separation it joins, it desires the haptic instead of the optic, the rhizome instead of the figure. (ISM)



The position of architectural thinking towards TV in the text of Ignasi de Solá-Morales was the starting point of our deliberations when defining the assignment and it remained valid even at the end of the semester in the reviews of student projects and our joint efforts to find a method of looking at, understanding and caring for not only the specific territory of LIDO, but realizing the potential of the Danube River environment and its banks in Bratislava and its borders.  We would like to express our gratitude to Ivana Rumanová and Peter Szalay for the impulse and for directing our attention and gaze and for their criticism during and at the end of the semester; we would also like to thank Andrej Badin for his perspective from outside Bratislava. 
 

Benjanmín Brádňanský and Vít Halada Architects, head of the department  dva/ja studio Department of Architecture of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. and private archotectural studio n/a

Students: Nicol Bodnárová, Mária Kostolníková, Michaela Krpálová, Nikhil Makhijani, Lívia Molnárová, Dávid Nosko, Sabina Savková, Nishita Talatiya

DÁVID NOSKO – COMPOSITE LANDSCAPES

This project entails the designing of composite landscapes and terrain variations through the accumulation of unused or waste objects and materials.  Depositing methods have been designed to ensure they provide a new richness of living conditions for vegetation and fauna which will enhance the diversity of biotopes and species. The resulting composite landscapes are the confluence of the activities of humans and nature. (DN)

The TV in LIDO has been identified by the city as a dump, but also possibly as the site of the accumulation of ideologies and programs which so far have existed not only as physical fragments but urban histories, legends and dreams.  Although the project focuses on the physical accumulation of material and waste, and their conscious depositing in space creates a new terrain and spatial basis for non-anthropocentric communities, and people and their presence connected with meaningful program content in a space defined in this way remain knowingly open and problematic.  One layer of interpretation of objectionable anthropocentric or ideological dreams, plans and histories could be a continuation of this project towards an even richer landscape of accumulations and transformations.



MICHAELA KRPÁLOVÁ – NEW VAGUENESS, NEW WAVE AND NEW TERRAIN

The aim is to create equality through the alienation of all three types of visitors (animal, citizen, outcast), while providing them with a uniform feeling of comfort and discomfort, and allowing them free passage and coexistence. Permeability for all, however also the neutralization of this battle between nature and people in vagueness and lack of clarity. Vagueness could be manifested by an alien amplified terrain vague that belongs to nobody. Rope and Mesh as a semipermeable, transparent barrier. 

The designated territory as a medium for the movement and intermingling of various visitors to this territory is neither a human nor natural territory; it is a new vague, chaotic territory willingly left for the continuation of chaos, at the mercy of natural and alternative human activities. (MK)


Stress arising from the confrontation of the city, nature and off-social is articulated in the spatial structure of barriers, alignments and knots. The juxtaposition or closeness of diversity and otherness is inherent to TV.  Deer by the exit from the bridge amid the colorful clothing of cyclists – a surreal moment – surprise, joy, fear, danger. However definitely authenticity. If the city is a theater where citizens play their roles in a cultivated manner, then the TV can be a meeting place of the acted and the natural, as well as the authentic - off social or excluded or not yet accepted by society. The linear or potentially network-like character of the designed structure, which goes beyond the framework of manifestations of encounters, by which it shows the possible ambition to connect flows across existing environments, remains questionable and provocative in this project.  Green corridors of nature conservation legislatively ensuring migration for fauna can become a precedent for parallel and penetrating networks of natural and social diversity.