9 novembre 2015 – Conférence de Victor JONES
affiche-conf-pontLe 9 novembre 2015
LE PONT DE BASENTO
Le pont de Basento a l’origine, devait être simple viaduc routier reliant une ville méridionale italienne provinciale avec le reste du pays, mais au lieu de cela, l’ingenieur Sergio Musmeci et l’architecte Zénaïde Zanini. ont eu l’ambition de modifier l’image ternie d’une ville par l’édification d’un ouvrage exceptionnel aux aspirations esthétiques, sociales, spatiales et structurelles entrelacées.
Le conférencier, Victor Jones est un architecte américain, basé à Los Angeles, et ensiegnant à l’école d’architecture de USC de Los Angeles
This Lecture BASENTO Un Pont recounts how two visionaries toiled to realize their dreams for purposeful design within a beleaguered country’s own struggles in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Basento Bridge is the crowning achievement of a relatively unknown Italian engineer named Sergio Musmeci and his partner, architect Zenaide Zanini. Originally, they were commissioned to design a simple vehicular overpass connecting a provincial southern Italian city with the rest of the country but instead the engineer and architect embarked on an ambitious journey to build a masterwork intended to alter a city’s tarnished image and erase memories of a place whose very existence had been repeatedly jeopardized by poverty, natural disaster, and war.
Though largely about the past, this lecture is directed to the future. Urgent attention exists for infrastructure to perform beyond its singular and traditional role, as thousands of miles of aging highways, elevated expressways, and bridges are overdue to be replaced or retrofitted. Previously overlooked, infrastructure and its presence in the city has garnered increased attention offering an opportunity to re-examine its role in shaping urban space beyond what have become narrowly defined reductive terms of utility. Any such discussion cannot exclude the Basento Bridge and the design principles that distinguish this exceptional specimen of engineering from its mundane counterparts.
This journey deciphers the entwined aesthetic, social, spatial, and structural aspirations for the Basento Bridge. Triggering a reassessment of structural engineering’s biases, the story prompts us to open our imagination to a broader range of possibilities – beyond prevailing orthodoxies; beyond rote construction methods; and above all, far beyond constraints that are determined entirely by considerations of cost and expedience. Herein lays the wonder of discovery and the potential for more tactful planning, design and deployment of infrastructure projects.