Brenner motorway. Architecture and landscapes

Photographs and models, maps and diagrams, videos and original documents draw a virtual version of the Brenner Motorway, projecting the visitor into a place where the medium is no longer the vehicle.

Photographs and models, maps and diagrams, videos and original documents draw a virtual version of the Brenner Motorway, projecting the visitor into a place where the medium is no longer the vehicle.

The Brenner Motorway is one of the most important segments of the European road network: 314 kilometres long, it climbs more than 1300 metres between the Brenner Pass and Campogalliano. The subject of much research before and after its completion in 1974, the Brenner Motorway deserves to be studied as architecture. From this perspective, the bridges, viaducts, tunnels, junctions, toll booths, rest and service areas that follow one another along the original embankment, appear as parts of a unitary work, designed to measure itself against the scales of the territory and landscape.

The exhibition stages this complexity in the evocative space of the Galleria Bianca.

In the Iconographic Maps section, the photographs taken between 2021 and 2022 by Giovanni Hänninen, along and nearby the A22, interpret the relationship between the territories crossed and the stretches where the motorway passes through the Po Valley, enters the Adige Valley and ascends the Alps in the Isarco Valley. The photographic campaign highlights peculiar features and unexpected conditions: the acceleration of the transformations on the edges of the motorway in the ‘Po Valley megalopolis’; the persistent pattern of soils on the sides of the rivers; the apparent fixity of the Alpine context. A large floor map of the motorway route allows visitors to orient themselves along a line to which both the photographs hanging on the walls and the 15 three-dimensional models refer, representing the territory arranged within a radius of 500 metres around the 22 service areas of the A22.

The Palimpsests section monographically investigates the spaces of the motorway infrastructure using methods that are reserved for the study of architectural heritage. Documents from various archives reconstruct the route of the Brenner Motorway throughout history. An articulated diagram of the motorway locates nodes and civil engineering structures in cross-section and longitudinally, and marks the presence of tunnels, bridges, viaducts, service areas, stations, overpasses and subways, and noise barriers. The projection of historical films and new maps support the interpretation of the diagram and the ‘picture gallery’ set up along the opposite wall. Originals and reproductions of a selection of drawings and photographs depicting the most significant works along the route are arranged according to their actual geographical sequence. The diagram opposite them thus facilitates orientation, demonstrating the authentic nature of the motorway: a palimpsest within a territorial palimpsest.