Blowing Dust Off the Trails: An Itinerary Through Trans-Saharan Lines
It is foolish to build on sandy grounds, says the old truism. Le Corbusier argued there were two spatial strategies across the Sahara at the time of his writing Aircra (1935) [ 1 ]; one on top of the other, in the same page, Le Corbusier chose a photo of a waterhole for nomadic caravans and one of a...
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| Formato: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2020 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Universidad de Navarra |
| Repositorio: | Dadun. Depósito Académico Digital de la Universidad de Navarra |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:dadun.unav.edu:10171/122178 |
| Acesso em linha: | https://hdl.handle.net/10171/122178 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Architecture Dust Sahara |
| Resumo: | It is foolish to build on sandy grounds, says the old truism. Le Corbusier argued there were two spatial strategies across the Sahara at the time of his writing Aircra (1935) [ 1 ]; one on top of the other, in the same page, Le Corbusier chose a photo of a waterhole for nomadic caravans and one of a fuelling station for airplanes. Mirroring each other, both refer to a logic of halting along the road. eir complicity is that both are physical points revealing invisible trans-Saharan lines that the camera cannot capture: for the eyes of the nomad and pilot, the desert is traversed by multiple sensorial lines of travel. Le Corbusier selected a cliché image for the nomad—to the point of not even identifying it1—and a curious one for the pilot. “Nerve-centre on the imperial highway,”2 as he footnotes; “Le Bidon 5” symbolised the French project for connecting the colonies to the north with those to the south of the desert. Concluded just some three years before Le Corbusier’s publication, the highway was to join the 1,300 kilometres that separated Reggane, in south-west Algeria, from Gao in the Niger river. |
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