Éveil au crépuscule (Awakening at dusk)
The Turcot Interchange is an architectural structure whose unusual and spectacular beauty is equalled only by the scope of its visual, auditory and olfactory dominance on the surrounding landscape. The Éveil au crépuscule project consist in constructing the Turcot interchange by means of photographs and video shot on the site and bringing it to life with 3D open Source software and game engine.
The immersive environment thus created will be presented to the visitors’ disquiet by means of and interactive device.
These days, it is hard to picture how the engineers, urban planners and elected officials, around their meeting table, drew up the first sketches leading to the construction of this gigantic tangle of high-flying freeways. Their consideration were apparently far from the work of metabolistic architects who recommended an extendable urban structure that would allow for a process of organic growth. They were also far from the ideas of the groups like the Archigram collective , or the ephemeral, pre-fabricated and evolutionary project described by Rem Koolhaas as one of the “ last urban planning movements.”
The site is a place of emptiness – a non place in the parlance of anthropologist Marc Augé – located on the fringes of the city where a few artists have inscribed their ephemeral works of graffiti on huge concrete pylons that are mow falling into decrepitude. Their colourful inscriptions, like Lilliputian signatures, appear at the structure’s foot in a reminder of the human body’s vulnerability and its absence from an expanse that is as dehumanized as it is subject to the use of humans. We move through this almost brutal and certainly Brutalizing urban landscape as adventurers, with mixed feelings of exaltation and dread.
The pylons supporting the highway’s arcs and an incalculable number of roads the overlap on the horizon provide an ideal backdrop for sinister transactions or a Hollywood action film. They conceal a potentially infinite number of graphic configurations that emerge at each change of perspective when one passes through the expanse, as empty and hollow as it is noisy. Depending of the time of day or year, the sunlight sometimes caresses the pylons, setting up a visual rhythm somewhat reminiscent of pre-historic megalithic structures or certain European dolmens:” a sophisticated, correct and magnificent play of volumes under light” in Le Corbusier’s words.
In eloquent testimony to the structural dismantling of a crumbling economy based on the production and use of polluting, gas-guzzling automobiles, the Turcot Interchange has entered its final phase of life, as announced in spring 2007. The demolition work is slated to begin in 2009 and extend over a 10 year period. The deconstruction and metamorphosis could make way for an environment that comes closer to “archology” , the encounter between architecture and ecology Italian architect Paolo Soleri has been developing since the 1970s in Arizona, to the incredulous derision of reactionary mass consumers. Or perhaps we will see the appearance of a few “blobitectures” (in witch buildings have a soft and round organic form, like an amoeba) modelled on the creation of British architectural firm Future Systems. This is unlikely if we believe the Quebec Department of Transportation according to whom ”(translation) the project covers the reconstruction of the Turcot, De La Vérendry, Angrignon and Montréal-Ouest interchanges with the view to reducing the number of aerial structures and constructing as many road sections as possible at ground level or on embankments”. In any event, it is during this pivotal period that the Turcot Interchange will become the central icon in the Éveil au Crépuscule interactive installation project.
At the twilight of this declining civilization, dependent on the consumption of disappearing stocks of petrol, the Quebec Departement of Transportation and the city of Montréal are preparing to spend up to $ 1 billion over 10 years in refashioning roads whose obsolescence has been anticipated for many years. Nonetheless, it is not without a certain pang that we have resolved to witness the disappearance of a structure that seems to be an eloquent remnant and essential component of the city of Montreal’s urban heritage, comparable to Silo #5 located in its old port.
We might be able to awaken this absurd and monumental structure one more time before it is swept away by the tornado of urban demolitions that always seem to threaten metropolitan Montreal, blowing away the tangible traces of traffic jams suffered through by hundreds of thousands of commuting workers day after day.
In the final phase of its existence, the Turcot interchange suggests the image of a giant insect. Having this masterpiece of late 60s modernistic engineering morph into an animal and flee with its last breath would be reminiscent of the work of the Dutch artist/engineer Théo Jansen , who uses genetic algorithms to simulate evolution and bring structures looking like oversized insects or crabs to life. Like a colossal sleeping phasm, feeding on steel and concrete, the interchange stretches as far as the eye can see to the city’s edge, forming a grandiose, hyper-sonic landscape, a corridor in which nothing and no one seems to be able to live.
What is a phasm? Its is a disturbing insect that the French philosopher Goege Didi-Huberman associates with a sham in his essay on appearance. As he puts it, “(translation) The phasm makes its own body the stage set in which he hides….It is what it eats and what it lives in.”
I have seen a phasm only once, when I was a child walking in the rural scrubland of Provence that surrounded my parents’house. It was with stupefaction mixed with disgust and wonderment that I made the surprising discovery of an instect that I had taken for a piece of straw. With this piece on the Turcot Interchange, I am revisiting that precise and paradoxical moment of discovery, the moment of seeing an inert thing become an animated, moving , biological being. The moment when we realise that what we once thought of as a beneficial apparatus bringing mobility and wealth becomes what pollutes and degrades our quality of life. The insect has no head or tail, so it is impossible to picture it from a frontal view and deduce how it moves. The place we travel through is the animal that will soon devour us if we’re not careful. Everything that appears there possesses a “(translation) power of the dissimilar, everything that is dissimilar proves in the final analysis to be only a threatening quality of the place.” Geoages Didi-Huberman in Phasmes: essais sur l’apparition, 1998, p. 20.
In this context of metamorphosis and decline, the project consist in recreating an environment from photographs and video shots along the Turcot Interchange’s length and producing a spatialized interpretation that will be assaulted and stirred up by visitors. The virtual reconstitution will constitute a kind of contemporary audiovisual anthem in memory of a structure that inspires so many contradictory feelings.