The floating landscape of the lake of Santa Giustina. Rediscover and reactivate “invisible” landscapes through interventions between water, nature and architecture

The issue of the energy supply has always played a fundamental role in the transformation of the landscape, particularly in the alpine territories. Since the Fifties,  impressive infrastructures were built in the Alps necessary for the production of hydroelectric energy.

These works have heavily altered the places, the lives and the territories of the areas involved. The lake of Santa Giustina – in the north of the city Trento (IT) - was formed following the creation of the dam which quickly hid, under its waters, an invisible landscape made up of traces of the ancient communication system, bridges, streets, mills that have now become submerged ruins.

The invisible landscape periodically appears because the basin is regulated by environmental, energetic, economic flows and conditioned by strong alluvial events, strongly increased with the climate change, which generates a high variation in the height of the water level. The lake becomes a floating system that shows and hides its slopes, passing from living landscapes, made of vegetation and water, to other ones made of stone and silence.

The projects propose different interventions distinguishable by size and strategy united by a shared strategy of meeting between water, nature and architecture. These interventions, facing the extremely vulnerable and changing environment such as the artificial basin, adapt themself to the fluctuation of the lake, transforming critical issues into opportunities.

These proposals want to be possible strategies that future cities will have to consider and adapt to coexist and contrast the critical progress of climate change.