Reconnected to An Ancient Canal
The Change of Canal Corbulo Under Dynamic Coastal Landscape
X. Zhang (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
G.A Verschuure-Stuip – Mentor (TU Delft - Landscape Architecture)
LPJ van den Burg – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Urban Design)
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Abstract
In light of increasing global divisions, it has been questioned whether human beings are able to connect and communicate with each other when encoutering geopolitical conflicts. The author's experiment on this matter and proposal for this project begins with what was once united but is now divided - the Limes, a legacy left from one of the most powerful rulings in history, the Roman Empire.
After UNESCO's approval and nomination, the Limes is now a linear connection covering three continents, laying the groundwork for the reconstruction of a shared cultural identity.
By zooming in on the research location in the northwest portion of the Limes, the land between old rivercourse Rhine and Meuse (now the Hague - Leiden metropolitan area) in the Netherlands, where there was once a Roman canal called Canal Corbulo now with few traces remaining on a socio level, we can see that heritage faces the same threat of vanishing and obvilion just as nature in this area.
This project seeks to investigate the past landscape, the potential of connections between time and space, and the future cooperation between heritage, environment and society.
This project's objective is to illustrate a heritage-led solution based on the concept of 'in place' to build an open-air museum that reflects the regional development of the human-landscape relationship through the presentation of narratives at diverse time scales.
This thesis focuses on applying the theory of cultural sustainability as a method in research and design to generate a landscape framework, allowing integration from monoculture lands on site to a dialogue between heritage, ecology, and human, projecting the long history of manmade landscape in this region, and reflecting the boundaries and limits humans push with nature.
Moreover, with the pilot design, prototypes of representing heritage will be adapted and implemented on to the entire Canal Corbulo line, with the optimism of serving as a template for future research and design explorations on the Limes, realising the idea of connection from place to place.