Dopo l'obsolescenza. Progetti per i viadotti ferroviari dismessi

This article focuses on the increasing number of abandoned railways converted into new parkways, briefly investigating them trough the prism of obsolescence. Over the past forty years, the features matching with the average lifetime of infrastructural buildings have became of growing relevance dealing with contemporary policies in restructuring our territories. In the beginning of 21th century, facing the new challenges of the post-carbon era, cities of developed society are riddled with technical ruins, testaments to their recent productive past. Since the entanglement of transport infrastructure, industry and architecture highly represents important segments of 20th century urban tissues, the end of their use cycles raises questions concerning its formal and local impacts. We would like to stress how, in order to re-obtain continuing use of those abandoned artifacts, architecture has to provide proper answers to the complex interweaving of technical questions, economical and cultural aspects always embedded in such processes. Those issues, that are to be described in figurative terms (rather than trough diagrams, lists, or other non-figurative methods), demonstrate how temporalities act among other catalysts in urban regeneration processes. Shortly comparing recent examples of obsolete infra-tecture cutting trough urban tissue, such as the High Line, the Reading Viaduct or the Bloomingdale Trail, we will show how they distinguish themselves from the previous case of the Promenade Plantée in Paris. Meanwhile, the devise of a new configuration of concepts affirmed the transformation of obsolete railways, rather than their demolition, as leading practice. Moreover, and closely intertwining questions concerning art, architecture and technology, the mobilisation of the two primary notions of industrial heritage and landscape has definitively attributed aesthetic values to those former relics, revealing them as powerful tools in addressing new project strategies.