ANTONIA CORNARO | INTERVIEW


ITACUS is part of the SCAUT (Swiss Center of Applied Underground Technologies) prototype project for vegetable farming in a cave in Hagerbach, Switzerland. “There is also a very interesting concept


for an underground park in a former trolley terminal in New York. The developers, two young men, a young engineer and young architect who used to work for NASA, are applying fibre optic technology to bring natural light into the underground space. And they have proved that they can grow big trees there. So the park would be unaffected by the seasons or the weather. “So we don’t have to think of the


subsurface as dark hostile spaces. They can be very accommodating spaces if they’re designed the right way and if they are created in a way that provides lines of sight, and space, and pleasant design and pleasant climate and so on. “I am on the planning – you could call


it the visionary – side and I work with tunnelling engineers. The two professions have quite different languages, and quite different perspectives and inputs and outputs; they differ also in their working method and what they see as the important parameters.” Planners look at the project on a macro


scale. That is the nature of the planning profession. The engineer is taught to just focus on the project per se. “But I think it is very beneficial to work


together. I teach a class at the ETH Zurich called Planning of Underground Space, and has a mixed pool of students. So I have


civil engineers and I have planners and architects, as well as some geographers and environmental engineers, and that makes it very interesting. I mix them in groups and they work on projects related to underground space. “They all say they have a hard time at


first to find the common way forward, and to know what is important and how to go about it, how do you achieve the final result and what aspects do you focus on in the work. The engineers will always be looking at the technical solution and the architects will be very much interested in the design and the look and feel of the whole concept. And the planners will be very concerned with the benefits and impacts of the overarching project. But together they then come up with usually very good results.” This semester they worked on the


Subspace Energy Hub student competition project, coming up with innovative technologies and ideas to make the Hagerbach Test Gallery net zero. “Emission reduction and reducing our


footprint is at the core of our daily work these days and as an industry we need to strive for the best ways forward. At ITACUS there is also a project with


ISOCARP, which is the International Society of City and Regional Planners. They have a “very successful” programme together called Young Professional, Think Deep Programme (YPTDP) – ‘Deep’ because subsurface planning challenges are involved. “We do that for cities or for organisations in mixed teams with young professionals.


We have just completed one in Gdansk, Poland for instance, where a river had to be crossed to connect two disjointed parts of the city. The issue was Bridge or Tunnel? And how do you benefit the community? How do you make it accessible for cars but also for trams? How do you get bicycles and pedestrians across? They came up with four concepts that were presented to the city government and well received. Similar projects have been undertaken in


cities such as Glasgow and are in planning for Zurich, Hong Kong and Athens. “These projects are about young


engineers and tunnelling engineers not thinking of tunnelling infrastructure as being an aim in itself but more about the general urban context. “That, in the future, is going to be so


important, because at present we really treat the underground very much from a discipline-based point of view and as a separate layer. The geologists are involved and the civil engineers and the technology tends to rule. That means a lot of things get forgotten in the process or are never considered. Planners need to communicate better with tunnellers and tunnellers need to work with planners and make them understand that they must involve the subsurface in their schemes. “That said, although there are always


conflicting points of view along the way, I think that in the end tunnelling infrastructure projects always seem to be an asset for their city.


Above: Antonia Cornaro and colleagues at the Hagerbach Test Gallery, in Switzerland, where research includes a prototype for vegetable farming for underground environments


June 2023 | 33


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