Project Detail: Breuil/ the city of tall rates, built in to desert of rocks

Contest:

Emerging photographers 2018



Brand:

LuganoPhotoDays



Author:

Simone Petitjacques

Status:
Selected

 

Project Info

Breuil/ the city of tall rates, built in to desert of rocks

In origin Breuil was simply a village to the more famous feet of one of the thick ones of rock and inespugnati of the world, it was a station of comfort before the slope toward the top of the mountain. It was simply a place of rest before the ascent toward the glory.

At the base of the development and change of the landscape the last century has determined the crossroad from the inglorious past to the imminent future. When in 1935 the architect and painter Mario Cereghini, of I lick, it reaches Breuil, the city newborn of Cervinia (name given to the village in the fascist epoch), things tannings immediately that its job won't be an easy too assignment. Called, from the fascist commune of the epoch, to create the plain Regulator and to draw some buildings that would have had to mould the face of the newborn alpine place, among which the prophetic Hotel of the Sun, strongly drawn on purpose for the entrepreneurs needy Gallia to possess a place symbol of a city destined to the greatness. All good intentions but the scenery, seen by the great researcher of the architecture of mountain, it is already of a landscape to the work, dense of bulldozers and of foreign maestranze, in which the engineers build roads, dikes and funivie, leaving the most prestigious and not easy challenge to the architects, the direct comparison with the housebuilding local, done of small hotels and of some shed abode.

Despite the great perseverance of which it is in possession, Cereghini immediately folds up him to the strength of the Lugo declaring to surrender then openly to the expectations and the will of the little present public: "when I reached Breuil in 1935 to plan a hotel, with my modest fame of modernist, owed suffer so many injustices from the pseudo-competent ones, that at last owed refold on less free external forms, to be able to succeed in the enterprise" avoiding therefore to invest on the future. That future that instead, a po messily, a few years will come later.”

The construction of the new architectural landscape of Breuil happens for degrees, strongly growing unlike the past in vertical. In primis, the face of the valley comes deeply transformed by the appointment of the hydroelectric engineers that, using the value and the strength of the water they go to turn into energy, hocking so a notable entrepreneurial strength in the greatest yard they climb on ever realized for the construction of hydroelectric impiantii, that here as elsewhere he/she lets a follow him of endless nets and sovrappopolate of yards and roads. This whole sudden change produces some wounds in the landscape that you/they will be closed only with notable effort time with the strength of a nature that will reabsorb with patience and time you drag of inglorious finds. The old resident community of the place, is employed, together with the southern population migrated to Valtournenche, in the local industry of the hydroelectric one and, to follow, in the most important and popular factory of the tourism and vacation, bringing himself/herself/itself so to the footstep of place to the epoch well more notes and famous as Curtain Of ampezzo, Bardonecchia and Courmayeur.

Breuil however, unlike the other place, holds a he/she forces intrinsic that confers her a charm and importance in more. The mountain is entirely nearby superfluous to name her/it, an icon, idolized almost for the conquests of the peak in fascist epoch and also later; the great rock pyramidal twist towers and Europe divides in the two separate zones. Today as not settled then fortunately still by stupid and useless languages of asphalt or galleries.

It is born so, with different stories and sketches, the myth of the mountain and his/her residents and the first ones to acknowledge all of this I am really the "foreign." In any image, photo, picture or simple sketch of yesterday as of today the Cervino always polls to the center of the look, and when you/he/she is put to side, evidence is noticed geometric inequality among the objects created by the man and the majesty of the mountain. The thick one is risen to icon, symbol that tells and it divulges the existence and the beauty of the place to the tourists, thing that the timid and taciturn inhabitants of the valley knew for a long time perfectly. You tells, as an epic poem, that the mountain of all the mountains came "defeated" from the alone man after the same had conquered those of other distant and different worlds. A pomp that the mountain makes even more iconica and monumental, a way to let to the same man to understand even more that also the modernity to due to find it hard.

Incomplete beauty?

Cervinia, is a real city of tall quota, built in a desert of rocks and ice with roads, viaducts, traffic, parking lot, rotatory, services, hotel and condominiums. It represents the conquest of the Alps, that strength industrialist that changes and a difficult and sour territory makes hospitable and common, dense of a different soul from the megalopoli of lowland. It is an expression and symbol perfect of the expansion of the tourist phenomenon of mass and industry of the leisure time. Cervinia is one of the consequences of the process of invention of the mountain; we could say the inevitable result of the to propagate him of that strength of the modernity and his to become incarnate in the territory. Strength soaked with rationality that for a long time guide the to act human in the world, that has brought, among the other things, in the last three centuries, to the transformation of the mysterious place Alps, appalling and therefore unapproachable, to place of exploitation, to productive space and of consumption, to moon park.

Breuil, proposes therefore to the observer a look, the more distant and objective possible, of the evolution of a territory emptied of his/her own soul and reconstructed following different canons from his/her own identity. The intent of the images is that to gather the atmosphere of the environment they climb on, it deals with a riproposizione of a landscape that unconsciously it postpones to a melancholy vision, but that in the project you/he/she is visually revalued as extension of the absent human presence, but at the same time included.

Photos