Station d'épuration des eaux usées d'Aïre

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The plant from above, in the left part of the picture the reactors, in the foreground the administration and on the banks of the Rhône the garbage loading
The administration building with the brise-soleil placed in front of the facade like a frame and with the sculptural roof landscape
The loading station for solid waste

The station d'Épuration des eaux usées d'Aïre is the large sewage treatment plant of the canton of Geneva . It was planned and built by the architect Georges Brera 1964–67.

Building description

Formally appropriate solutions first had to be found for the then new construction task, for a system in which wastewater that was collected in a pumping station and then distributed to different areas of an industrial complex, there were no generally applicable, iconographic examples.

Brera fits most of the system into the landscape on the wide loop of the Rhône , along the banks of which a footpath now leads, the actual clarification basins with the sewage collectors and reactors are functionally arranged on a large rectangle, only the service building itself is designed in the axis of the access road them as a landmark over the river.

The design language of the pumping station and the service building has many similarities with Le Corbusier's buildings from this era: the pilotis (the house on pillars), the brises-soleil , which sculpt the facade as sun protection, the sculptural structures of the roof landscape and the exposed concrete refer to the role model.

Critical appraisal

Large industrial and supply systems were (and are) rarely designed as landscape-forming elements. In this respect, the sewage treatment plant stands in a certain way in the tradition of Ledoux's revolutionary architecture , but also in the utopian visions of the future, for example by Tony Garnier . Current examples of understanding such large building dimensions as sculptural elements of the landscape can be found in the Braun works in Melsungen by Michael Wilford and James Stirling .

literature

  • Christa Zeller: Swiss architecture guide; Volume 3: Western Switzerland, Valais, Ticino. Zurich: Werk Verlag 1996. ISBN 3-909145-13-2
  • Florian Adler, Hans Girsberger, Olinde Riege (HG.): Architekturführer Schweiz , Zürich: Les Editions d'Architecture Artemis exp. New edition 1978, ISBN 3-7608-8004-5
  • P. Fumagalli: Organize a function, find a form, Aïre-Geneva wastewater treatment plant, 1967. In: Werk, Bauen und Wohnen 7/89, ISSN  0257-9332

Web links

Coordinates: 46 ° 11 '49 "  N , 6 ° 5' 18"  E ; CH1903:  four hundred and ninety-five thousand seven hundred and sixty-eight  /  117064