Desired roads, designed roads: Land art and its correlation with architectural and civil engineering works

Abstract

Land art’s (and even minimal art’s) irruption in the 1960s induces a disruptive change in the artistic world, combining the notion of surrounding landscape through ephemeral interventions in natural spaces that involve the spectator in its entirety so he/she experiments and embraces the work of art through the action. Thus, the resulting work becomes detached from the process and the relations that arise with the individual that experiments it (something really common in linear designs). Therefore, the artistic work needs and nourishes from both artist’s action and spectator’s participation in natural surroundings, and through the process becomes a living work, an inhabited work, which lastly establishes visceral and emotional connections with the places that we occupy. In that way, the landscape is understood as the place that sets the surroundings of the work of art, and it’s the landscape itself that ultimately integrates the artistic work. Some of land art’s experiences have their own conceptual and formal correlation with civil engineering and architectural projects. The expression of many linear works, such as the road that accesses Sa Calobra from the “Serra de Tramuntana”, or even the pedestrian overpass over the Ribeira da Carpinteira, and its artistic appreciation emerge while looking and appreciating the landscape in its entirety, taking into consideration terrain morphology, its geological and geotechnical features and combining it with design aspects regarding traffic, speed, steepness and so on, knowing that the junction or fitness between landscape, terrain, and linear design planned by the engineer or architect generates a work that is different from the road itself, a “path”, defined as a concept close to land art work’s introspective reflection.