Dax

The project restores transparency to the district’s hydraulic systems and guides floodwaters towards a priority flood control zone: a vast urban park developed on plots of land that can be converted over the short term. Using a combination of cut and fill based on the topography and historical layout of the barthes, we proposed creating inhabited dykes and raised islands. These above-water territories constitute land reserves that can be used to relocate some of the district’s human activities and support new residential and economic development or public facilities and services. Such features make it possible to live on the dykes rather than behind them, restoring a visual relationship with the river.#cut

The old, often culverted water systems were resurfaced to become wider canals. The traverse, which passes under the railway embankment in the lower barthe, creates a vast wetland park, while the dykes along the Adour reinforce their hybrid character as inhabited infrastructure. The project reveals evidence of the barthes’ historic coverage and combines it with a new pattern for the water and canals, a network of roads and paths and aligned rows of planted trees that form a sort of outline to provide structure for the site’s development, orient views and shade paths leading towards the river.

The project introduces two major landscapes of water: one, the open landscape of the river, which is paradoxically very urban and highlighted by the inhabited dykes and their raised public spaces that overlook the river’s everyday course; on the other, a rustic, elementary interior landscape which restores the full scale of the floodplain of the Adour.