TVK, Pierre Alain Trévelo, Antoine Viger-Kohler, David Malaud and Mathieu Mercuriali
With the help for the drawings of Stella Armeli and Phoebe Eddelston, with Lou Cavallo, Aness Kajeiou, Léo Lallemand, Piotr Marczac, Baptiste Picard, Ackbaree Rumjaun and Cécile Triadu.

This article summarize a research on the terrestrial morphology of infrastructures, based on the case study of the Parisian infrastructural relief. Published in a special issue of Built Environment (vol.51, n°2) by Alexandrine Press, the article develops a paper presented by Pierre Alain Trévelo at the international seminar “Rez-de-ville: Urban Ground floor”, organised by Andres Sevtsuk and Justin Kollar from the MIT City form lab, and hosted on September 22th and 23th at the School of Architecture and Planning, Boston MIT.

Infrastructure could be considered as a terrestrial fact. Based on a latourian anthropological perspective considering technical objects as more-than-human things, the article studies infrastructure as a geomorphological agent. Much like water, wind, and magmatic activity, it is indeed taking part in the “blowing” of the earth, namely the continuous creation of a porous relief shaped by the biogeochemical processes that agitate the “critical zone”. 

“Blown earth” is explored via the study of the Parisian infrastructural relief, first presented through a map showing the main infrastructural landforms. The description of this topography is achieved through a glossary of 6 geomorphological archetypes (cavity, terrace, escarpments, bed, counterfort, plateau), illustrated by historical situations.

The authors have then a deeper look at the morphogenesis of three specific infrastructural massifs whose last transformation has been designed by TVK. These projects reflect a new infrastructural era where infrastructural heritage is being recycled, integrating the challenges of continuity of public spaces and soil vitality. The retroactive rereading outlines three architectural processes of transformation (alteration, erosion, aggradation), creating three-dimensional landscapes that become habitable by a diversity of human and non-human activities, and thus strengthening the terrestrial anchorage of infrastructural relief.

Finally, this geomorphological inquiry leads to a redefinition of infrastructure, as the intermediate concept that holds Earth and architecture together. It opens to a possible update of the all’antica theory of architecture as surédification (“building-on”), based on three modalities of this mediation: formation, foundation and coalition.