Slow Up-rising by Ja Studio

Here's the fascinating entry "Slow Up-rising" by Canadian firm Ja Studio to Solar Park South, the international ideas competition in Calabria, Italy. The competition brief called for a 'Solar Highway' by re-using Salerno-Reggio Calabria highway sections between Scilla and Bagnara to be decommissioned by the Italian Highways Authority. As Ja Studio partner Behnaz Assadi tells us: "Our response was not along the requirements of the competition brief, however we sent it for jury review and publication, since we thought it would give a different perspective on the story of the decommissioned highway." We love it.

Project Description:

Modern infrastructures are extra large. They facilitate the connection between major urban nodes and allow cities to expand. They are designed to maintain the large and their existence signals the dissolution of the small. They cross the deep valleys, bypass the difficult roads and shortcut the peaks; thus dissolve the small, distant and hard to reach nodes and communities.

The project emerges at the critical time when the demise of one of these giants appears on the horizon. A highway is about to be decommissioned as a new highway would create an even faster connection in its place. Our proposal is a gentle ramping platform that connects the top of the by-passing highway to the bottom of the valley. This connecting platform through time would allow a new form of life to appear. The mono-functional body that once cast shadow on its immediate surroundings would start to get populated with life and through time would turn into a unique mix of habitat and infrastructure. The gradual re-appearance of the small would both safeguard the extra-large and also introduces new possibilities for the co-existence of the two.

The proposal is not a solar park that generates energy for another fast method of commute, It is an eco-park, but not because it generates more energy, because it questions the very idea of fast by-passing connections. The proposal is fundamentally skeptical about clean, fast and advance engineering solutions and it stakes out its territory on the very spot of one of these failed engineering solutions. The proposed project does not compromise the slow to the fast or the fast to the very fast, it is not about compromise. It is a project that embraces life with all its weight, dirt and inefficacies.