LAKE SIHL 48
Sarem sunderland Sarem Sunderland is a landscape architect and researcher based in Zurich, Switzerland, and Munich, Germany. He is currently writing a doctoral thesis on the relationship between hydroelectric infrastructures and landscape at ETH Zurich. Sunderland is a founding member of the architecture collective la-clique and a board member of the Swiss Federation of Landscape Architects for the regional group of Zurich.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, HISTORY
D
ams are omnipresent on waterways in Switzerland to the point that they’ve become a key element of national identity. Yet, despite the interest that landscape architecture has built in infrastructure over the past few decades—particularly in terms of transportation and flood protection—infrastructures of hydropower remain outside the scope of the discipline. With a few notable exceptions, such as the works of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the United States, landscape architecture’s involvement with hydropower tends to be limited to the realm of mitigation. The infrastructure is viewed as something destructive to the landscape, and so hydroelectric landscapes become an accidental by-product of the infrastructure itself – sometimes beautiful, sometimes odd, but never intentionally designed. Hydropower is currently making a comeback in public debate in Switzerland. The idea of building new dams and raising existing ones is gaining momentum, bolstered by climate change, the energy transition, the renewal of contracts for water rights, and—from the perspective of hydropower—opportunities coming from glacial meltwater generated by a warming planet. However, the discussion of landscape architecture’s role in shaping these facilities has moved little since the 1970s: landscape remains a passive background in hydropower, which in most cases has had little to do with landscape other than causing its destruction. The story of Lake Sihl in northeastern
