Benches Park - Stefano Ivaldi, Simone Valsecchi

The project for the former Dubied areas has the flavor of a challenge. Launched by the theme of the adaptable city, comes from an interpretative reading of the territory at large scale. The study area is located in the interior of a linear network that holds together the villages that form the City of Travers, along the valley of the Areuse river. It is an enclave between the waterway and the regional railway, highly introverted, cropped from its infrastructural borders. An area with a strong longitudinal development that works at the same time as an interface between the urban grid of Couvet and the landscape, becoming a meeting point between nature and culture. In this context, the project’s aim is as much about the role of longitudinal form defined by the orography of the valley and infrastructure that cross it, as about the transversality, which defined the matrix of development of the urban grid. If you ponder the orientation of the mainstreet you can also realized how that element is basically due to a village that was originally developed perpendicular to the development of the Valley of Travers.

Benches Park then opts for a bilateral settlement principle, capable of turn the former industrial area centripetal and to return it to the city. This gives rise to two intentions. First the aim is to work on the theme of the park as a place for civil and to offer public space of relationship in con- tinuous evolution. The space is characterized by metamorphic material for excellence: the green, open to annual and stagional changes. The main updatable space, with its infrastractural role, is able to allow the widest use. Secondly the choice to work using a grid that holds together lengthways and transverse. On this “support” descend three linear elements (the park, a woonerf and a footpath along the river) and other cross which result as an alternation of full and empty bands. These ensure compliance with the existing and the creation of green themed rooms, the first are defined by buildings that extrude and fold to become public terraces and telescopes on the landscape.

The intervention at last faces the theme of time, which translates on one side with the attempt to think of functions and spaces able to ensure a continuous use of the park in different time slots, on the other side with the need to think of a chrono program allowing a phased implementa- tion of the design process. A plan open to doubt and uncertainty rather than absolute, certain and predetermined. This latter aspect underlying the theme of the city in evolution, built by parts, not to be understood as a set of urban fragments without logic, but rather as part of a whole, of a project and an overall design, a scenario and a vision for the city of Couvet.