Atlantropa 2.0 - ENG

Cristiana Penna

ǸTLANTROPA 2.0 THE EURO-AFRICAN CONTINENT

To Us

170 Alleli / Research Series 8HNJSYN‫ܪ‬H (TRRNYYJJ Edoardo Dotto (ICAR 17, Siracusa) Emilio Faroldi (ICAR 12, Milano) Nicola Flora (ICAR 16, Napoli) Antonella Greco (ICAR 18, Roma) Bruno Messina (ICAR 14, Siracusa) Stefano Munarin (ICAR 21, Venezia) Giorgio Peghin (ICAR 14, Cagliari)

ISBN 978-88-6242-828-6 First English Edition October 2023 First Italian Edition October 2020 © LetteraVentidue Edizioni © Cristiana Penna © Archival drawings: Deutsches Museum, Munich, Archives Thank to the Deutsches Museum of Munich for the contribution to the realization of this volume, by sponsoring the publication of some archival drawings of the Atlantropa project.

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Cristiana Penna

ǸTLANTROPA 2.0 THE EURO-AFRICAN CONTINENT

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Based on: Osvaldo Guerrieri, La diga sull’oceano. La folle avventura di Atlantropa, Neri Pozza Editore, Vicenza 2019, p. 72.

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Introduction

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The generating ideology The Euro-African continental vision The hydroelectric power plants in the Mediterranean’s Straits New cities The Mediterranean Sea in motion

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The dynamism of the contemporary landscape Suspended, consolidated and in progress Euro-African contemporary landscapes Atlantropa: a contemporary landscape partially in progress

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Atlantropa / Utopia / Landscape / Artificial landscape / Mediterranean Sea / Maps and Geography

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Carlos García Vázquez

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Richard Brook Cathcart

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Ǹ XWRSLD LQ SURJUHVV INTRODUCTION

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Atlantropa 2.0 is the final result of my Ph.D. research elaborated at the Department Architecture and Territory of Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria in collaboration with the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Sevilla and the Archive of the Deutsches Museum of Munich in Germany.

The expression Atlantropa 2.0 prefigures the newest version of the megaproject Atlantropa1 made by the German architect Herman Sörgel in 1928: a new Continent in which Europe and Africa are linked mainly by the deconstruction of the Mediterranean Sea’s various basin Straits2.

In Sörgel’s imaginary, the shallow-sill Straits assume the configuration of territorial continuities and energy landscapes showing, on one hand, their natural dynamism and rejecting, on the other hand, their own illusory condition of interruption. These aspects reflect the Macro-engineering designed actions that primarily will affect the transformation of the Mediterranean Sea and, consequently, those related to the African Continent. All the designed landscape alterations are referred to the construction of eight massive concrete dams spotted in the Straits and at the mouths of the main Rivers of the Mediterranean Sea Basin as next producers of clean energy and physical connections between Africa and Europe.

According to the project timeline prepared before 1953

by Sörgel, these new infrastructures will activate the planned and progressive evaporation and lowering of the Mediterranean Sea in 150 years, bringing it back to its prehistoric level prior to the construction of the Gibraltar Dam. Besides, in order to reduce the arid Sahel belt, the deconstruction process of Africa will start by building channels to increase the freshwater volume of the existing Chad Lake beside the imaginatively foreseen new inner freshwater seas based in Congo Region and in the deep Qattara Depression of Egypt.

As starting point toward a full understanding of the bi-continental Herman Sorgel megaproject, which incorporates not only architectural but also engineering, geographic and socio-political factors, more concepts will be introduced in order to define the time-frame context in which Atlantropa may be born, until discovering its present-day and future contemporary meaning.

Landschaft, landschap or landscape has a geographic and territorial meaning referred to a specific geographical space with its own identity as well as physical and legal regional borders. In other words, a place built by the single person or thought for the community that has a complexity of social, economical, cultural and political relationships. Landscapes are nature and artifice or more briefly,

1 In some cases the name Atlantropa will be replaced with New Continent or Euro-African Continent, because both fully reflect Herman Sörgel’s project for Europe and Africa.

2 In some cases the term Mediterranean Sea will be replaced with Basin because it is a sea that exists only as it is fed by the ocean through the Strait of Gibraltar.

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they are anthropo-geographic places as the Italian architect Vittorio Gregotti has defined them. Spaces that historically are more and more built and continuously re-founded by the revealed culture experience «which on one hand is the conquest of new points, new dynamics of observation, new communication systems and new strategies for the desire of the group and the single3.

An idea of geographic landscape intended as «environmental set4» where the most complex aspect is considered the action of studying and so, eventual understanding and interpreting its dimension. About that complexity, Gregotti refers to some studies related to the interpretation of the geographic measures, identifying the following: the geography-architecture scale relationship, for which under a certain dimension the definition of environment starts to be more precise «ones immediate surrounding5»; the relationship based on the duality, for which architecture is the discipline of the project while geography is the one of those known in terms of verbal (oral and written) description; or again, the representation-communication relationship based on the apprised appearance of modern artists and their different interpretations of the geographic dimension; concluding finally with the architecture-urban planning relationship, which is focusing more on problems and experiments related to the big physical scale of architecture – the “macro” and “mega” – and so the urban planning challenges for the transformation of the Earth’s natural environment. Huge landscapes metamorphosis that can let «move on from one language to another [...] [and in which] the set of signs made by humans on the territorial surfaces will became the significant language of collectivity and its capacity of imagine6». Ability to imagine, which characterized specially the first thirty years of the Twentieth Century, having as protagonist the futurist avant-gardes that involved, since the beginning the field of printed literature, paintings, musical compositions, sculptures and, particularly since 1914, also architecture.

The Futuristic architecture specially was based on new geographic deconstructions and utopian ideal city models, sometimes inspired by storytelling’s, sometimes by the critic publicly expressed attitude against the status quo and the individual’s ever-present courage for imagining a better world, however expressed.

Within this frame, the etymological ambiguity of the term utopia7 can includes many scenarios in which often it is not possible to separate what could not exist from what instead could exist with the common factor of generating, in both cases, illusions8. Dystopia cannot exist thoughtfully if utopia is absent. In other cases, instead, utopia is a complex concept which needs to be broken down into

3 Vittorio Gregotti, Progetto di Paesaggio in “Casabella” n. 575-576, year IV, 1991, p. 2.

4 Ibidem.

5 Ibidem.

6 Ivi, p. 6.

7 Neologism coined by Thomas More from the union of two words of ancient Greek language, topos which is the place and ou which means not and so non-place, even if some understand the initial U as the Greek eu, and therefore read good or excellent place.

8 Umberto Eco, Storia delle terre e dei luoghi leggendari, Bompiani, digital edition, 2013, p. 520.

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many parts just as Ernst Bloch theorized. According to him, there are two kinds of utopia concepts: abstract and concrete. The first one is fantastic and compensatory, a mere desire without a real future of obvious apparent change; on the other hand, the second one is anticipatory and it is based purely on desire and hope9. And so, if the abstract utopia tends to get lost in fantasy and fallible memory, the concrete utopia tends to the possibility of realization or materialization, reality10. All the consequent scenarios, based on those two kinds of utopia concepts, differ from each other due to two conditions: the reasons underlying the vision and the [non]existence of the vision’s place. Thus, the visions can be divided into three main categories: the imaginary one or rather representations of fanciful continental maps, islands, archipelagos based on places inspired by myth and legends; the ideal ones, or rather representations of ideal city models for places that never have actually existed or that at one time were certainly extabt but not anymore; futurist ones or rather representations of future scenarios based on the alteration of the Earth’s geography by imposing upon the landscape and seascape huge infrastructural systems such as dams, highways, transcontinental railways, artificial canals and channels which actually becane geographically real between 1920 and 1930 when Sorgel first contemplated the essentials of his visionary architectural program.

The modern era, indeed, have represented the historical reality in which for the first time the machine take over of Nature, breaking down any classic canon and creating the iconography of a new era. The discovery and widespread adoption of rebar-reinforced concrete defined the opportunities available for many possible structural designs and buildings of the new architecture models being formulated. Besides, the projectable worlds of tomorrow were based on metropoli suitable for mass society in motion between industrial areas, stations and harbors so as to facilitate a continues transit of industrial resources, people and produced goods.

Anthropo-geographic landscapes became based on the concept of chaos, speed, surprise effect, sounds and the culture of the esoteric and popular image.

Such new scenarios interpreted and represented by many architects of the period, whose great European exponent of the twentieth century’s avant-garde was the Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia11. In his drawn representations the landscape was indicated to be a machine producer of electricity generated by huge turbines, material presses, land-levelers and high-voltage transmission cables and which goal was defining new shapes, new lines, a new volumetric harmony through inspiring re-compositions and

9 Ruth Levitas, Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia, in “Utopian Studies” v. 1, n. 2, Penn State University Press, Pennsylvania, 1990, p. 15.

10 Ibidem.

11 Author of one of the manifesto of futurism, published on 11 July 1914.

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amazing dissonances12. In Sant’Elia’s way of thinking about modern architecture, cities were to expand unrestrictedly in both vertical and horizontal directions, replacing existing landscapes with new artificial landscape transformations composed with new elements such as skyscrapers, long-span bridges, rail and motor vehicle underpasses, transalpine tunnels, hydropower dams, fueled power plants.

All were to be connected to each other by vast networks of interconnected systems, pipelines and grids. A modern way of thinking that tended towards the construction of ground spaces conceived as abstract systems of interchange and mass production in which the new dominant models stimulated and exalted the ability of architects to imagine, to propose and to buid feasible alternative realities based on a logic of utility. And so faster and faster movements of goods and people through dense conveyance networks was to be pervasively induced.

By the time utopian iconography based on remodeling entire real-world geographies by subversion of existing natural geological and climatic assets through construction of artificial reservoirs, power-lines, hydroelectric plants, super-highways, high-speed railways, entirely new cities and bridges became realities in many parts of the European continent and in the world. Some examples: the Zuiderzee Project in Holland that – as Nil Disco e Bert Toussaint in From projects to system: the emergence of national hydraulic technocracy, 1900-1970 or again in the research Delta Urbanism: The Netherlands – was realized partially for increasing the local agriculture economy and partially for protecting the coastline from the ocean storm-surges and river floods which occurred between 1717 and 1825. Although the first project apotheoses are dated historically back to circa 1848, only in 1891 did the totalizing project dreamt

by Cornelis Lely received approval did the project’s commence realization begin in 1920. Lely produced a detailed map of the seabed for proposing the reclamation of the area through the construction of a linear earth dam, 32 kilometer-long, to eliminate the tidal and storm erosion macroproblem and to transform a naturally enlarging gulf of the sea into a new river-filled freshwater basin. An advantageous transformation, both in terms of freshwater and land resources made useful, done through astute drainage, irrigation and water-level control systems. The works mainly ended in 1932 with the emergence of 207 square kilometers of new empoldered landscape.

Another one is the USA’s Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an electrical generation and distribution company organized in 1933 which nowadays provides electricity for 9 million people. The energy production of the TVA comes from 29 hydroelectric power

12 Antonio Pizza, “Rappresentazioni futuriste”, p. 74.

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plants, fossil and plant fuels, nuclear power plants, natural gas-powered turbines, wind-farms and solar panel installations and it is distributed the TVA’s assigned territory. The goal of this complex macroproject plan was to solve mega-problems such as: the insufficient energy supply, the need for forest replanting, the reduction of risk of river floods and the improvement of the navigability of the Tennessee River for barges to allow greater development in the Tennessee Valley Region. Again, the Sila plateau project in Calabria Region of Italy, made by the engineer Angelo Omodeo between 1927 and 1933, is paramount. The plateau extensions were equal to about 3,300 square kilometers and its valley compositions allowed the construction of a series of sluices for building irrigation basins, hydroelectric dams and finally several artificial reservoirs.

Within this frame of realized landscape-seascape mutations, the Atlantropa Project devised by the inimitable Herman Sörgel do not appear anymore as an isolated phenomena but, to the contrary, the Euro-african Continent and its Gibraltar Dam were not more then a particular manifestation13 which opens many questions in different fields such as architecture, civil Macro-engineering, cinema, art, music, politic and sociology. Actually, many inquiring persons have questioned about the project’s true feasibility while others since circa 1929, the beginning, chose to classify Atlantropa as a fantasy utopia or as the Italian journal Corriere della Sera, published during 1928, defined “[...] a the bizarre german dream”. Although from the beginning Atlantropa project has been classified as a utopian project, Sörgel had ambitious goals and he strongly believed that his unique macro-plan was achievable14.

In his documented visions he was focused on the future development of the Old Continent15 looking for a new possible reality for the Mediterranean Sea Basin and beyond. This conceptual orientation to a possible reality or realiteis became the guideline of the following related research that unveils a new Atlantropa Project through unpublished iconographic studies, accompanied by some of the original drawings obligingly granted for this publication by the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany.

My research started at the Deutsches Museum where it was possible to consult the all original drawings and documents that were well-preserved in the Herman Sörgel Archive. The investigation reveals a distribution of the materials divided into two sections (Fig. 1): the first one collects manuscripts from 1911-1950, private works from 1928-1952, minor works produced between 1920 and 1922, publications about the Atlantropa Project collected

by Herman Sörgel and the (two) Atlantropa Institute offices, from

13 Alexander Gall, Atlantropa: A Technological Vision of a United Europe, in Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850–2000, edited by Erik van der Vleutena, and Arne Kaijser, pp. 99-128.

14 Philipp Nicolas Lehmann, “Infinite power to Change the World: Hydroelectric and Engineered Climate change in the Atlantropa project”, American Historical Review, February 2016, p. 73.

15 The Old Continent is Europe.

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1938-1952, with a small part dedicated to Exhibitions dating back to the period between 1932 and 1942; the second one consists of the collection of all the project drawings – plans, sections and perspectives, mostly in color – iconographies, infographics, documents, newspaper clippings, articles, photographs, membership lists of the Atlantropa Institute and post-mortem newspaper clippins. In particular, the Project drawings are visible representations including three metric scales: the continental one involving Europe, Africa and the Middle East; the territorial one that enters into the assumed merits for extensive transformations of the landscapes of the Basin of the Mediterranean’s Straits as well as the famous rivers that debauche into the Mediterranean Sea and finally, the urban one with the interpretation of the reimagined and new cities along the manipulated Mediterranean Sea’s revised coastline.

The Archival research in Germany was fundamental for me to piece together the continental vision which actually can only be fully understood through the parallel reading of all the existing published examinations and reports such as: studies on infrastructural routes, demographic surveys, geomorphological studies of the Mediterranean Sea and the African continent, representations on the concept of sustainability both in the electric car sector and in the construction sector, study sketches on the processes that led to the final projects for the several dams or, again, surveys topographical and photographic. A multidisciplinary wealth of data and information consisting of drawings, mathematical calculations, geological investigaton summaries, energy calculations, structural and building studies laboriously carried out for more than a decade by Herman Sörgel and the Atlantropa Institute’s membersship.

Therefore, on the basis of the materials found, an attempt was made to give a broader reading of the Atlantropa Project in all its metric scales by describing the design hypotheses made by the architect Herman Sorgel and all his helpful collaborators.

Original maps of the resulting Atlantropa Project scheme have been undertaken for this research in order to present a full overlook of the continental Euro-African energy system, the intercontinental infrastructural network, the [de] construction of some African landscapes, the dams on the Straits and on the great rivers still flowing into the Mediterranean Sea together with the [de] construction of the possible new land emergences. The story that continues in the following pages of this book is based on my fundamental questioning of Herman Sorgel’s twentieth-century vision: what is the contemporary, twenty-first century meaning of Atlantropa?

+NL ‫ ד‬8JRNTYNH reconstruction of the preserved materials at Herman Sörgel archive of the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Author’s drawing.

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Manoscritti 1911/1950 Lavori privati 1920/1922 1928/1952

Herman Sörgel’s Archive

Atlantropa Pubblicazioni 1938/1952 Mostre 1932/1942

Disegni Piante Sezioni Viste prospettiche

Infografiche

Atlantropa Documenti Articoli di giornale Corrispondenza epistolare Articoli Foto Lista dei membri dell’Istituto Atlantropa Report post-mortem

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It is the end of the First World War, the European social and geographical context had been shocked by wartime destructions and, subsequently, Germany changed its way of making architecture. Leonardo Benevolo1 is explicit about it and he clarifies how the business itself stops, construction materials change, customers demand something different and there is an inevitable need for a quick postwar reconstruction. Thus, a subsidized construction mechanism was launched through the use of reinforced-concrete as the newest main construction material. The economic hardship is revealed with the disintegration of social classes in favor of innovative trends besides the consequent psychological condition of the moment, all well described by the famed German architect Walter Gropius: «the full awareness of my responsibility as an architect, based on my own reflections, was determined as a result of the First World War, during which my theoretical premises took shape for the first time. After that violent shock, every thinking being felt the need for an intellectual change. Each one, in his particular sphere of activity, wanted to make his contribution to fill the disastrous gap that had been opened between reality and the ideal»2.

Indeed, in this context many mega- and other lesser projects were designed as utopian alternatives in which, often, the protagonist of those visions was the assumed Mediterranean Sea Basin identity3. A change that affects both teaching methods in architecture schools and the approach to the architectural project. At the same time the Old Continent is going through a tentative process for economic-political union, in particular along the Franco-German axis to carry on the idea of the European Community already reaffirmed in previous times with George Podiebrod, William Penn, Abbot Charles de Saint Pierre and even Immanuel Kant. In 1922, the Austrian Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi4 tried to concretize this economic-political union through the new political movement

1 Leonardo Benevolo, Storia dell’Architettura Moderna, Editor Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1975, p. 434.

2 Ivi. 3 Iddo Ginat, Matanya Sack, Scala regionale/Sogni mediterranei, in “Rivelazione del sud”, Milan 11 June 2013.

4 He lived between 1894 and 1972, he was a politician, philosopher and founder of the Pan-European Union.

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+NL ‫ ד‬-JWRFS Sörgel, (1929).

Mittelmeer-Senkung.

Sahara Bewässerung (Planeuropa-Projekt), p.

81, Gebhardt, Leipzig.

paneuropa, initially welcomed by the great intellectuals of the time until a quickly clashed with the fear of a Second World War based on the acclaim that Adolf Hitler won in Germany. In fact, in 1933, the new Chancellor of the Reich prohibited the disclosure of the Pan-Europe book imposing also the dissolution of the movement itself.

Herman Sörgel’s overall thinking and explication closely follows Kalergi’s work, and thanks to the affinity between the political ideology and Atlantropa project, he initially decides to give to his geographical vision the same name as the young political movement. However, that denomination already in 1932 was modified into Atlantropa or Festland am Atlantik5, precisely because of the political trends concurrently occurring in Germany.

Sörgel’s continental vision as well as the Kalergi’s, although ideologically close to each other, are however defining two different geographical realities in terms of territorial organization. The Austrian politician, Kalergi, imagined a continent with historical geographical limits referring to ancient Greece, for which the world must be divided in Asia, Europe and Africa. Herman Sörgel, on the other hand, describes a continent geographically consisting of Europe and Africa within a global scenario made up of three great powers, Die drei großen A, America, Asia and Atlantropa (Fig. 1) placed in front of each other, on a par in spatial, political and economic terms. Moreover, both these visions stand in contrast to the further proposal of Wladimir S. Woytinsky, Die Vereinigte Staaten von Europa, for a Euro-Russian community. From the beginning Sörgel does not imagine this scenario feasible and so he continued promoting in opposition a single Euro-African Mediterranean Sea Basin-focused reality in which European migrants would have inhabited the new

5 Source: Wolfgang Voigt, Atlantropa–Weltbauen am Mittelmeer. Ein Architektentraum der Moderne, Membran, Germany 2007, p. 101.

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+NL ‫< ד‬TQKLFSL Voigt, (2007). &YQFSYWTUF <JQYGFZJS am Mittelmeer. Ein Architektentraum der Moderne, p. 102, Editor Membran, Germany. +NL ‫) ד‬JZYXHMJX Museum, Munich, Archives, CD 77895.

fertile African regions and the Mediterranean Sea would become the link and energy landscape of the New Continent. To emphasize his future vision, he elaborated two manifestos evoking, on one hand, a utopia and on the other hand a dystopia: the first is representing the image of a peaceful Euro-African union, Atlantropa, protected by a symbolic glass-dome; the second one, instead, is the image of Europe that burns, does not improve, does not develop and explodes over the black and empty Africa (Fig. 2).

About the first idyllic and peaceful Euro-Africa scenario it is important not to forget the real Western pacifism concept, in that time inherent in everyone, based on the flavor of alliances of convenience and negotiation whose only purpose was to divide up the territories that guaranteed raw materials and underpaid work.

Peace intended as a temporary condition based on the subjugation of lands and peoples following a vast scale war or just like an alternative to a war between Europeans. Indeed, in the early years of the twentieth century, France and Spain owned parts of Morocco, Italy acquired Libya, Belgium took the Congo region while Germany, which came last in the colonial division, got the African equatorial and Middle Eastern scenario. Thus, in this historical context, it can be said Sörgel’s singular vision returns a unitary utopian Eurocentric scenario which strengthened the European dystopian hegemony over the African continent (Fig. 3), very attractive because of its virgin landscape apparently full of resources, a place of acquirable wealth for the European people.

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Atlantropa is a new geographical reality located between the Strait of Gibraltar and Palestine and between the Northern Europe and the extreme South of Africa. Morphologically it is definable as the result of the Mediterranean Sea Basin’s metamorphosis, including all its Straits and the African Continent.

The Straits are the protagonists of the fractionation actions and consequent evaporation of the Mediterranean liquid matter in which Sörgel sees not only the key to the new geographical configuration of the Basin, but also a continuous energy source.

According to his calculations, the New Continent (Fig. 4) would be revealed entirety only after one hundred and fifty years from the vast morphological transformation starting. Progress which include the construction, temporally planned, of eight hydroelectric power plants in the Straits and in the great Rivers flowing into the Mediterranean Sea (Fig. 5) as producers of about 110,000 mega-watts – of which 49,000 MW comes only from the large reinforced-concrete dam emplaced in the Strait of Gibraltar – and necessary for the future energy sustenance of Europe (Fig. 6).

The Straits, due to their particular historical and geographical meaning, can be described in different ways such as: punctual interruptions of geographical continuity; limited terrestrial surroundings, that almost always take on the condition of conflicting places; extremely delicate and vulnerable transit points, they are in fact subjected to particularly strong controls as part of the military, commercial and cultural policies of the countries bordering them6; liquid landscapes between two lands; energy landscapes; doors to the oceans, such as the Suez Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar; or even dynamic landscapes that are never identical. Beside as many gates, on the opposite banks of the Straits converges the complex infrastructural systems made by the concentration of commercial traffics, information flows and the travelers transit.

6 L. Thermes, G. Neri, F. Cardullo, O. Amaro, M. Tornatora, C. Vicari Aversa (edited by), Il progetto dell’esistente e il restauro del paesaggio, Reggio Calabria e Messina: l’area dello Stretto, 7 Quaderni del Laboratorio Internazionale d’Architettura, Iirti Editor, 2010, p. 10.

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In Atlantropa, the Straits are also pieces of a highway, railway and air mosaic connecting Europe, Africa and the Middle East (Fig. 7), whose main axis is the one connecting Berlin to Cape Town passing through Rome, Messina and the new capital7 of the Euro-African continent (Fig. 8). All the other infrastructural axes cross Europe and Africa transversely and longitudinally, identifying important junctions in Gibraltar, Messina, Aleppo and Cairo (Fig. 9), in which the airway lines from Barcelona, Milan, Rome, Trieste, Berlin and London converge (Fig. 10).

According to the plan of the scholarly German architect, the construction of the dams will make possible the emergence of about 660,200 square kilometers of “unnatural” new native lands (Fig. 11) useful for the starting of a new touristic and agricultural economy.

According to his macro-project, all the Basin’s coasts advance without exception, the shape of some nation’s changes, different archipelagos grow and merge such as the Cyclades in Greece, Sardinia and Corsica, Ibiza and Formentera, Mallorca and Menorca, Malta and Sicily. Instead, the islands of Djerba, Elba, Corfu and Kefalonia, Samos, Chios, Lesbos, Kos completely lose their nature as islands as well as Sicily, which is no longer an island because it increased twice its current size joining Italy through the Strait of Messina that becomes a new territorial continuity. In this scenario of induced geomorphological mutations, the nation that most changes its identifying shape is Italy, which totally incorporates the absent Adriatic Sea, it having become a mainland (Fig. 12).

In 1932 instead, looking to the African Continent, Herman Sorgel and the engineer Bruno Siegwart imagined a seawater landscape based on the design of new channels and seas within the African regions (Fig. 13) with the aim of reducing the Sahara-Sahel belt latitudinal dimension and so increasing the area of fertile lands (Fig. 14), in favor of future human migration from Europe. In particular,

7 In some Herman Sörgel’s writings the name of the new Atlantropa’s capital is the new Tunis, while in some other drawings it is indicated under the name Atlantropolis.

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+NL ‫& ד‬YQFSYWTUF territorial extension of the continental project.

Author’s drawing.

Berlino

Atlantropolis

Città del Capo

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+NL ‫& ד‬YQFSYWTUF the eight Mediterranean Sea’s dams. Author’s drawing.

Diga del Rodano

Diga del Po

Diga dell’Ebro Diga di Dardanelli Diga di Gibilterra

Diga del Canale di Sicilia

Diga di Messina

Diga del Nilo

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+NL ‫& ד‬YQFSYWTUF emerged lands. Author’s drawing.

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+NL ‫& ד‬YQFSYWTUF Euro-African electrical network. Author’s drawing.

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+NL ‫& ד‬YQFSYWTUF Euro-African infrastructure network. Author’s drawing.

Londra Berlino

Trieste Milano

Madrid

Barcellona

Roma

Gibilterra Tangeri

Aleppo Atlantropolis

Il Cairo

Arabia Saudita

Dakar

Madagascar

Città del Capo

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+NL ‫& ד‬YQFSYWTUF main infrastructural axis linking Berlin to Cape Town. Author’s drawing.

Berlino

Roma

Atlantropolis

Città del Capo

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+NL ‫& ד‬YQFSYWTUF transversal infrastructural axises.

Author’s drawing.

Trieste Milano

Barcellona

Gibilterra Tangeri

Aleppo Atlantropolis

Il Cairo

Arabia Saudita

Dakar

Madagascar

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+NL ‫& ד‬YQFSYWTUF main air links. Author’s drawing.

Londra Berlino

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Atlantropolis

Il Cairo

Dakar

Città del Capo

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+NL ‫& ד‬YQFSYWTUF new Euro-African seas.

Author’s drawing.

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+NL ‫& ד‬YQFSYWTUF Sahel Strip. Author’s drawing.

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+NL ‫ ד‬-JWRFS Sörgel, (1929).

Mittelmeer-Senkung.

Sahara Bewässerung (Paneuropa-Projekt), p.

24, Gebhardt, Leipzig.

according to the calculations of Sörgel and Siegwart, the Congo River Basin region – which is surrounded by mountain ranges and it is located 500 meters above sea level – lends itself to the construction of a new freshwater reservoir of 900,000 square kilometers.

The transformation of this vast area into a freshwater landscape could be possible by constructing a hydroelectric power-plant north of the capital Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). The hydroelectric power-plant could have produced approximately 176,000 MW of transmittable electrical energy and could have subsequently fed Lake Chad through an internal artificial canal. The goal was the expansion of the lake surface to promptly reducing the desertification of the Sahel. Freshwater supply network, which will be completed by filling also the Qattara Depression with seawater, for which it was also planned to be transformed into a saltwater inland sea, becoming a major producer of electricity for Egypt.

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The entire landscape-making process of the continental transformation starts with the closure of Gibraltar and Dardanelles’s Straits in order to isolate the Mediterranean Sea from both West and East external flows causing, consequently, a seawater level drop of 165 centimeters each year will happen due to natural evaporation. The Gibraltar dam (Fig. 16), located along the least depth section of the Strait, assumes an arcuate shape (Figg. 15-17) to resist the forces of nature, namely the higher elevation North Atlantic Ocean, and possible military attacks. The massive gravity dam base, 2500 meters wide, lies on the seabed and the power-plants, designed by Emil Fahrenkamp, extend for 4 kilometers, reaching the north tower designed by the architect Peter Behrens. The tower has a dual function: it is the western gate to the New Continent in times of peace, allowing so the entry and exit of ships to and from the Mediterranean Sea; it is a sighting point for military defense in times of war (Fig. 18). The dam’s southern side,

+NL ‫) ד‬JZYXHMJX Museum, Munich, Archives, CD 77893.

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+NLL ‫& ד‬YQFSYropa: Strait of Gibraltar’s metamorphosis. Author’s drawing.

+NLL ‫ ד‬Atlantropa: Strait of Dardanelles’s metamorphosis.

Author’s drawing.

- 50 m

- 50 m - 150 m

- 100 m

- 100 m

- 50 m

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+NL ‫ ד‬-JWRFS Sörgel, (1929). Mittelmeer-Senkung. Sahara Bewässerung (Paneuropa-Projekt), p. 28, Gebhardt, Leipzig.

instead, hosts the Atlantropa National Park as new tourist destination including planted and tended cedars, palm trees, cork oaks, Aleppo pine forests and freshwater lakes. On the other hand, for the Dardanelles’s Strait was planned the construction of the smallest dam of the Mediterranean Sea, no more than 1200 meters wide and in correspondence with the Turkish city Chanakkale.

Bruno Siegwart and Herman Sörgel designed the engraving on the peninsula of Gelibolu (Gallipoli) (Figg. 19-20) to obtain the necessary slope for the correct functioning of the small dam, which one had also a double function: to prevent the entry of seawater into the Basin and to preserve the Black Sea from the Mediterranean drying process. Only after the definition of this mega-engineering action, the architect Lois Welzenbacher designed the curvilinear hydroelectric power-plant consisting of seven buildings arranged in a comb and a lookout-lighthouse with a cantilevered cabin (Fig. 21).

In 1931, Sörgel faces the design of both the dams of the Sicily’s Channel and the Strait of Messina as one single barrier that would divide the Mediterranean Sea in two areal parts. A mega-project to decrease the seawater level by less than hundred meters to the West area – since the cliffs of this Basin’s side would not have undergone major changes from a greater variation – and less than two hundred meters to the East area. The construction of the huge barrier will be possible only after one hundred years from the completed construction of the dam on the Strait of Gibraltar, as the Mediterranean Sea Basin will be reduced by one-fifth (20%) of its capacity of flow as well as the surface travel for people and cargo

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+NL ‫) ד‬JZYXHMJX Museum, Munich, Archives, BN 22041.

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+NLL ‫& ד‬YQFSYropa: Sicily Channel’s metamorphosis. Author’s drawing.

+NLL ‫& ד‬YQFSYropa: Strait of Messina’s metamorphosis. Author’s drawing.

- 150 m

- 50 m

- 150 m

Europa

Africa

- 100 m

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distance between Tunisia and Sicily will be minimized to 66 kilometers (Figg. 22-23). Moreover, due to its size, this one is indeed defined as the second largest hydroelectric plant of the finished Atlantropa project (Fig. 24). While, the third biggest one is the Strait of Messina’ dam (Fig. 25) whose projection is attributable to the architects George and Werner Wünschman.

The imagined Mediterranean metamorphosis transforms the former seawater seascape of Strait of Messina into a strip of newly useful landscape. A new landscape in which the two architects saw an urban development opportunity for Messina city in order to let it grow up to approximately six times its original pre-macroproject size (Figg. 26-27), filling the remaining housing shortage caused by the devastating 1908 earthquake. In this new scenario the Strait of Messina is anyway navigable through a transversal channel that allows the passage of large ships and other watercraft, while the expiation of the new industrial area provides a new economy based on the future treatment of the mineral resources obtained from the drainage of the seabed of the Strait.

Herman Sörgel, together with Hans Döllgast, also worked on the fourth largest hydroelectric power-plant of Atlantropa, the facility in Egypt. The Egyptian scenario, in his full architectural vision, is made by several large geographical scale projects such as: the connection of the Nile River and the Suez Canal for recreating the lagoon waters of the ancient river in order to use them as retaining expansion tanks for its yearly floods; the building of the dam to produce enough electricity to supply Libya, Syria and parts of the Arabian peninsula; the development of the Egyptian city of Port Said as

+NL ‫) ד‬JZYXHMJX Museum, Munich, Archives, CD 77894.

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a new infrastructural hub with railway stations, docks, airports for lighter-than-air aircraft and amphibious seaplanes; and finally, the capaciatay doubling of the Suez Canal which was envisioned as the vital eastern gateway to the Euro-African continent (Figg. 28-29).

After the Nile River dam, the full Mediterranean hydroelectric system is completed with the design of the dams in the other three major rivers of the Basin: the Ebro8, the Rhone and the Po. The massively transformative project for the Rhone River (Fig. 30) envisages a partial deviation of the same river into a new artificial canal hosting the dam, while the original mouth of the river is transformed into the new seaport of the modified city of Marseille. The River Po, on the other hand, is part of a more complex project involving the Adriatic Sea which is completely dried up at the end of the process of transformation of the Mediterranean Sea Basin by the Atlantropa scheme. Responsible for the project is the engineer Bruno Siegwart who designs an artificial drainage system by grouping the Po, Brenta, Adige and Piave rivers into a single channel. The goal is to lead them towards the Balkan coast, from which a subsequent interconnection of basins would have allowed both the construction of a navigable channel and the location of the dam consisting of a system of ten terraces (Fig. 31).

8 The Ebro River project is not described due to a lack of archival documents.

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+NL ‫ ד‬-JWman Sörgel, (1929).

Mittelmeer-Senkung.

Sahara Bewässerung (Paneuropa-Projekt), p.

34, Gebhardt, Leipzig.

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+NL ‫) ד‬JZYXHMJX Museum, Munich, Archives, CD 77947.

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- 200 m

- 100 m

+NL ‫& ד‬YQFSYWTUF Suez Channel’s metamorphosis. Author’s drawing. +NL ‫) ד‬JZYXHMJX Museum, Munich, Archives, CD 77892.

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+NL ‫) ד‬JZYXHMJX Museum, Munich, Archives, BN 22016.

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Within this enormous geographical context, Venice Lagoon (Fig. 32) is isolated from the drying up of the Mediterranean Sea – in order not to lose its uniqueness, much less its centuries-long importantly vital tourist economy – and it is preserved in isolation through the feeding of its lagoon by new imported seawater-carrying dredged channels.

Beside, other Italian cities along the coastlines go through the consequences of the natural Mediterranean Sea’ reduction in seawater volume metamorphosis and, indeed, there are several architects nominating themselves for the design of the resulting new cities. For example, in 1932, the architects Willibald Ferber and Georg Appel designed the town of New Genoa (Fig. 33), where the urban plan consists of three main parts: the installion of a green corridor for the protection of the extant historical center; the materialization of vast and dense systems of terraced houses and residential districts crossed by a radial paved road network; and finally, as core of their realized project plan, the building of both a shopping center almost four kilometers long and a connecting axis that dominates the sea together with the new industrial area, the port and the airport (Figg. 34-35).

Again, 1934, the Vienna academy’s students – guided by the architects Peter Behrens and Alexander Popp – designed the prospective project of New Naples (Fig. 36). Also in this case the historical center overlooks a vast green area, the rest of the city is divide by intentional zoning (Figg. 37-38) connected by a modern network of subways, while the Gulf with its new regular shape, hosts the tourist area.

+NL ‫) ד‬JZYXHMJX Museum, Munich, Archives, CD 77948. +NLL ‫& ד‬Ylantropa: Genoa city’s metamorphosis. Author’s drawing.

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Fig. 32 (previous page) ‫) ד‬JZYXHMJX 2ZXJZR Munich, Archives, CD 77891.

- 50 m

- 100 m

+NL ‫) ד‬JZYXHMJX Museum, Munich, Archives, BN 25681, BN 25682.

+NLL ‫& ד‬YQFSYWTpa: the metamorphosis of Naples. Author’s drawing.

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In Sörgel’s futuristic vision, the Mediterranean Sea becomes a means of communication between lands designating the role of immense “space-movement9”, with its own both well consolidated morphology and identity. Concerning this, the Mediterranean Sea is also as a body of saltwater, in totality a Basin composed of both the managed sea and its adjacent coasts, and a dryland region with a certain, mainly Mediterranean-centered climate that prevails over larger areas10, which defines the Mediterranean Sea as a unique, tangible landscape reality, due to its size, geomorphology and particular climatic characteristics. Landscape whose scale could be compared to what Christian Norman Schultz defined as macro-level ones11 and so explaining how sometimes an entire nation, due to its singular structure, can be the object of concrete identification12.

Referring for examples to Italy and Scandinavia which are both peninsulas, structurally similar but different dimensionally, and within which there are subordinate places that define their identity.

Where the term “place” means a whole made up of tangible things with their own material substance, shape, texture, color, and which together are defining an environmental character as essence of the place itself. Therefore, a place is a total qualitative phenomenon, which cannot be reduced to any of its individual characteristics13.

Franco Farinelli reminds us that the spatial characteristics of the Mediterranean Sea Basin refers to a specific category for which it is important not to speak about it in a singular way but in a plural one. Indeed, there are more Mediterraneans Seas, such as: the American one, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean Sea; the Sino-Maltese one consisting of the South and East China Sea, the Yellow Sea and the Indonesian and Filipino ones; the two large basins of the Strait of Korea, between the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk. Even the Arctic Ocean is sometimes called “mediterranean”! However, within this geographic scenario, the Euro-African

9 Franco Farinelli, Geografia. Introduzione ai modelli del mondo, Editor Piccola biblioteca Einaudi, Turin, 2003, p. 99.

10 Mohamed ElKassas, The Gibraltar Barrage.

Controlling the sea level of the Mediterranean would be an engineering feat and maybe both possible and necessary, in “Daring to Care.

Reflections of Egypt before the revolution and the way forward”, Moody Graphic International, Egypt, 2011, pp. 492-3.

11 Ibidem.

12 Ibidem.

13 Ivi, pp. 7-8.

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+NL ‫ ד‬8F\QJ^ 2FU Source: Jerry Brotton, Le grandi mappe. Oltre 60 capolavori raccontano l’evoluzione dell’uomo, la sua storia e la sua cultura, illustrated edition (Italian language), 2015, p. 50.

Mediterranean Sea differs from all the others for its being the cradle of a civilization and for the varietal richness of the many places that characterize it14. Besides, all the Euro-African Mediterranean Sea Basin places are visible in the most well-known cartography, such as: the Sawley map (Fig. 39) which shows the mythology linked to Scylla and Charybdis; the circular planisphere based on Roger’s Book (Fig. 40) which narrates of the origins of the Nile River; the Hereford map (Fig. 41) in which the Strait of Gibraltar is represented by the columns of Hercules. All representations, sometimes fantastic and sometimes more scientific which, in any case, corresponds to the personal perception of the man who drew the map15 as only means of both understanding and overall reading of the geographical landscape of the Basin.

These representations have crystallized in modern people multiple memories of the image of the Mediterranean Sea as briney liquid body although, a long time ago, it was solid and not navigable, arid and with a climate that was anything but mild. Territorial continuity – at the center of what used to be the united African continent – which change its previous matter condition when the ocean waters, digging the Strait of Gibraltar, transform it in the known Sea between lands.

Sörgel’s broad vision to recreate, in part, the primordial Mediterranean spatiality by shaping the liquid matter through the action of channeling it at different points and blocking it to force its natural evaporation. Deliberate action, done with the clear-eyed architectural aim of reuniting the fragments of what was once a whole, stripping the well-known Mediterranean landscape of its poetry, of its fantastic tales, now laid bare and transformed into a space-machine.

14 Braudel Fernand, Mediterraneo, Editor Bompiani, Milan, 2002, pp. 28-35.

15 Brotton Jerry, Storia del Mondo in dodici Mappe, Editor Feltrinelli, Milan, 2013, p. 40.

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This scenario devised and meticulously planned by Herman Sörgel and his associates both formal and informal, was especially based on his own geomorphological knowledge about the Basin and on the historical hypotheses expressed by Herbert George Wells in Outline of History16.

In the early 1920’s it was not easy to obtain scientific evidence for hypotheses such as those supported by the British futurist writer about a Mediterranean Sea that was once a mainland. At least until when, around 1927, Otto Jessen17 published precise oceanographic data about the Strait of Gibraltar claiming that the major rivers of the Mediterranean Sea – Po, Ebro, Rhone and Nile – would not be able to compensate, together with the annual rainfall upon the Mediterranean Sea itself, the continuous natural evaporation of the sea and consequently being able to keep the sea-level constant. In this sense, Jessen states about the existence of a time in which the Basin was dried up, which can only mean that during that period the sea was separated from the ocean18. Declaring, so, that the Strait of Gibraltar is the main arterial vein that continues to feed North Atlantic Ocean seawater into the Mediterranean Sea and without which it would disappear forever.

Precisely with regard to the hypothesis of a natural evaporational draining of the Basin, in 1867 the paleontologist Karl Mayer Eymar19 studied salt outcrop stratum in the Mediterranean area.

These sediments belong to a specific period of life of the Mediterranean Sea, called Messinian Salinity Crisis20 which refers to the imposing salt mines in the city of Messina. Briefly, it is hypothesized that the Messinian Salinity Crisis developed in two phases: the first, characterized by the precipitation of salt – following an important comprehensive evaporation of its seawater – whose relevant layers were deposited along the edges of the Basin; the second, characterized by surfaces eroded by the great rivers that flow into a Mediterranean Sea that has become a lake of brine.

16 H.G. Wells, Outline of History, Publisher George Newnes, 1919-1920, pp.

46-47.

17 Otto Jessen was a scholar of geography, geology and anthropology. He studied at the University of Munich, earning a PhD in 1914.

18 Daniel Garcia Castellanos, Alternative Mediterranean Six Million Years Ago, in Ricarda Vidal, Ingo Corlins (EDS), Alternative Worlds. Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900, Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publisher, Bern, 2015, p. 61.

19 Karl David Wilhelm Mayer-Eymar, Swiss paleontologist and geologist, (Marseille 1826 - Zurich 1907).

20 Daniel Garcia Castellanos, A. Villasenor, Messininan Salinity Crisis Regulated by Competing Tectonics and Erosion at the Gibraltar Arc, in “Nature 480”, 2001, pp. 359-63.

21 http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=5YJpnCjaok.

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+NL ‫( ד‬NWHZQFW 5QFnisphere from Ruggero’s Book. Source: Jerry Brotton, Le grandi mappe. Oltre 60 capolavori raccontano l’evoluzione dell’uomo, la sua storia e la sua cultura, illustrated edition (Italian language), 2015, p. 46.

Moreover, nowadays, after the discovery of a new sample of salt21 extracted under a layer of mud on the seabed of the Mediterranean Sea, some scholars claim that the Basin dried up totally at a certain time in its past existence. Therefore, it can be said that Wells’s hypothesis was not so far from the truth and that the image constructed by Herman Sörgel for the New Continent (Fig. 42) was not pure geological fantasy, but more exactly the restitution of a pre-historic stage of the European-African continent.

But what does it mean to bring the Mediterranean Sea back to one of its past geographical configurations? Professor Carlos Arteagata Cardineau22 explains what the consequences of Sörgel’s anticipated

22 Director of the online newspaper “Mundo Investigatión” and member of the Geo-Humedal Research Group. Source: http://www.uam.es.

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geographical metamorphosis, starting from the assumption that closing the Strait of Gibraltar implies, first of all, the lowering the sea level with a consequent decrease in rainfall and an increase in aridity of part of Africa and Asia. Besides, the Basin seawater lowering by volume reduction would cause: alterations at high and low pressure; temperature rise of 3 °C; sandstorms; sea-current course alterations; the decrease in salinity, the rise of excluded oceanic waters, with a possible increase in the polar ice surface and the increasingly frequent formation of cold wave airmasses, favoring a potential glaciation. And to demonstrate the validity of his hypotheses, the Spanish scholar compared Herman Sörgel’s Mediterranean transformation plan23 with two examples that actually occurred: the drying up of the Aral Sea and the crisis of the Dust Bowl in North America during the 1930s.

The Aral Sea, in the territory of Uzbekistan, dies from human causes and specifically by erroneous management of the cotton irrigation processes. Consequently, the collected data about its environmental degradation are more than merely worrying. The level of the remaining water mirror has dropped by about 23 meters in the immediatet past fifty years, the salinity increased by 14% and the temperature increased by 2 °C24.

On the other hand, the Dust Bowl crisis – occurred after 1929 in the USA – concerns thousands of square kilometers of soil subjected to inappropriate intensive cultivation. Landscapes that, unfortunately, got exposed to drought climate and series of powerful windstorms which prevented new crops creation and destroyed most of those existing.

23 Carlos Arteagata Cardineau, Atlantropa: el sueño utòpico de costruir la Atlàntida, in “Al Qantir”, Madrid, 2014, p. 178.

24 Ivi.

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Therefore, both examples reveal the environmental dystopia inherent in Herman Sörgel’s macroproject, which consists of increasing of the seawater’s salinity and ambient air temperatures, with the consequent impossibility of using the “unnaturally” emerged lands because most of them will be likely arid and unproductive, like the extremely arid Sahara desert.

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+NL ‫< ד‬TQKLFSL Voigt, Atlantropa. Weltbauen am Mittelmeer.

Ein Architektentraum der Moderne, Membran, Germany, 2007, p. 66.

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In the modern era the classic concept of landscape is lost, and it has been substituted by the concept of landscape as an apprehensible synthesis of the nature of the place, the cultural expression of the society that inhabits it as well as materials that can be molded through assorted techniques. It is no longer part of the whole, but it assumes its own recognizability as «visible face of the interaction between culture and nature, the civilization’s physiognomy that can be analyzed according to a stylistic forms1».

Having got over the concept of the landscape-image, the landscape is recognized as an expressive totality whose aesthetics is the set of «production regimes, [...] methods of cultivation, appropriation and distribution of soil, [...] construction methods and forms, [...] Hierarchization, symbolization and reuse of spaces [...] in addition to the environmental characteristics derived from the interaction with nature and the climatic [...] and geomorphological ones2».

Thus, the new anthropic landscape follows «its own laws rejecting or accepting neologisms [...] by attaching itself to obsolete forms or inventing new ones. A landscape as a language, [...] terrain of perpetual conflict and compromise between what is established by authority and what the vernacular insists on preferring3».

Therefore, it can be said that artificial nature is made up of a tangible and an intangible layer – cultural, historical and symbolic – where the latter is also changeable in retrospect of a material transformation of the place itself.

Ernst Jünger, already in 1932, «analyzing the global upheaval caused by technology in historical forms and the repercussions on the geographic and telluric nature itself, predicted that the tendency towards uniformity inherent in modern technology would not fail to affect the forms of the landscape.[...] The planned configuration should have replaced the randomness, the pluriversity and

1 Laura Bonesio, Paesaggio, identità e comunità tra locale e globale, p. 162, Editor Diabais (“Terra e mare” series), Parma 2007.

2 Ibidem.

3 Ibidem.

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the different genealogies of the landscape, an extreme metamorphosis based on the will to create terrestrial paradises, for which there is nothing isolated, nothing that can be considered in and of itself, nothing that is too large or small to be able to serve4».

Thus, it can be imagined as new spatial configurations with continental territorial dimensions based on the technology domain, placing «next to the vernacular landscape typology, [...] a political landscape, in which it can be translated a social, religious or ethical archetype [...] explicating itself on large scale through a geometrization of the territory, [...] the creation of a large communication routes system, interchange nodes or large infrastructural works5».

These processes of reorganization of Earth’s world geography reach the maximum exaltation in the futuristic avant-garde representations, while today those geography transformations exist as material and social realities visible in the disappearance of some landscapes in favor of the remodeling of entire territories increasingly built by intercontinental transport networks, communication, energy and people (Figg. 1-4).

However, among all the networks that summarize the complexity of the contemporary scenario, energy’s use is certainly the most articulated, due to many reasons such as: its being the lymph of today’s dynamism, its being protagonist of delicate political-economic intertwining which, at times tends to end with peaceful agreements and at times with war events, and finally because its uncontrolled consumption has generated the contemporary climate dystopia, resulting from global warming due to the carbon emissions output.

The consequences of this energy-climate relationship are increasingly visible in the ongoing wars for the sharing of resources and in the continual extraordinary climatic events which, like a domino effect, destroy territories, peoples and artistic, architectural

4 Laura Bonesio, Paesaggio, identità e comunità tra locale e globale, p. 168, Editor Diabais (“Terra e mare” series), Parma 2007.

5 Ibidem.

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+NL ‫ ד‬8^SYMJYNH redraw of the intercontinental transport network.

Source: https://atlas. developmentseed.org/ transportation/. Author’s drawing.

+NL ‫ ד‬8^SYMJYNH redraw of the intercontinental communication network. Source: https:// atlas.developmentseed. org/communications/.

Author’s drawing.

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+NL ‫ ד‬8^SYMJYNH redraw of the intercontinental energy network.

Source: https://atlas. developmentseed. org/energy/. Author’s drawing.

+NL ‫ ד‬8^SYMJYNH redraw of the intercontinental people flow.

Source: https://metrocosm.com/global-migration-map.html. Author’s drawing.

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and landscape heritages. Already in 2015, during the Cop-21, President Obama showed how the last 14 years were among the hottest in history ever recorded and how he saw the sea engulf the villages in Alaska, the tundra burning or the glaciers melted6. «An anticipation of the future that we are preparing for our children: submerged nations, abandoned cities, fields that no longer yield crops, new wars and [...] desperate refugees7». And actually the data of the CRED, only for 2018, record 314 natural calamities events that affected 68.5 million people and caused about 12 thousand victims.

In conclusion, we can deduce the loop condition that the contemporary era experiences in which consumptions and climate keep active a sort of self-destructive mechanism that, perhaps, will see an end when technology will succeed with the production and use of only zero-emmission clean energy. However, today this hypothesis is not yet feasible as the production from imperfected renewable sources is unable to respond to the global demand of energy although investments and researches in this sector have significantly increased.

6 Federico Rampini, “Il clima cambia, il paesaggio di più”, in Linee Rosse. Uomini, confini, imperi: le carte geografiche che raccontano il mondo in cui viviamo, p. 375, Mondadori Libri, Milan 2017.

7 Ibidem.

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6XVSHQGHG FRQVROLGDWHG DQG LQ SURJUHVV ǻXUR ǸIULFDQ &RQWHPSRUDU\ ODQGVFDSH Within the current intercontinental frame very briefly outlined, it is possible to half-see the complexity and the fragility that governs the contemporary era and its own international networks.

Both only perceptible with an in-depth scalar analysis.

For example, by observing the Euro-African Mediterranean area it can highlight the coexistence of realities that are as complementary as they are still so far away from each other. On one side there is Europe, that in the last hundred years has built community, legislative, cultural and infrastructural networks while on the otherside there is Africa, which dotted with territories on the verge of survival and rapidly growing centers. Two Continents whose networks used to stretch or contract elastically, and so distancing or bringing territories and peoples closer to each other in relation to the political, economic and social balances that govern the Euro-African macro-landscape. In this context, the Mediterranean Sea becomes a fundamental link because it is place of gas pipelines, power lines, communication lines and land-sealane transport (Fig. 5). A dynamic system interrupted by some missing links in those places that define the existence of the known Mediterranean Basin morphology and that paradoxically stand out for their being potential territorial continuities: the Straits, for which have already been imagined and planned new configurations but not fully realized or materiallized yet (Fig. 6).

The Strait of Gibraltar and its mutation from interruption to territorial continuity ranks first in the suspended Mediterranean Sea Basin landscape projects classification. Mainly due to the design and technical difficulties encountered along the fourteen kilometers of water between Spain and Morocco. The strong sea currents and an articulated seabed section, eight hundred meters deep, makes difficult today the placing of structural bases for the realization of one of the two most discussed engineering project

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hypotheses: the underwater tunnel, in the wake of the one built for the Strait of Dover; or a cable-stayed bridge which may be the largest ever built so far.

Continuing towards Italy, there are two other suspended landscapes which are waiting to become territorial continuities: the Strait of Sicily, the largest Strait of the Mediterranean Sea, and the Strait of Messina, the second smallest in the Euro-African Basin.

For the Strait of Sicily, there is no definitive morphological transformation project yet other than Enzo Siviero’s bold proposal for the construction of a railway line for the transport of goods, at least initially, and then perhaps for the transport of people. The hypothesized route extends for one hundred and thirty kilometers, from Pizzolato to Cap Bon, reconfiguring the Strait by introducing four new artificial islands necessary for the construction of the railway tunnel and perhaps, at a later stage, also useful for tourism or industrial purposes.

The new configuration of the Strait of Messina, instead, features a single-span bridge 3330 meters long and 382.60 meters above sea level, including four roads and a railway track for each direction way. A unique platform in the world whose final project is dating back to 2002, but which remain unbuilt.

Continuing to observe the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, it is possible to find also interesting consolidated landscapes such as: the implementation of both the Suez Canal and the seashore of Barcellona. The first one is the only artificial strait [channel] in the Mediterranean Sea, which has recently undergone an extension

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+NL ‫ ד‬.S[NXNGQJ 2JIiterranean Sea. Author’s drawing +NL ‫ ד‬9MJ HTSYJRporary mediterranean landscape vs Sörgel’s mediterranean landscape. Author’s drawing.

from 60 to 95 kilometers to enhance the efficiency of that intercontinental maritime network. The project is part of a strategic territorial planning with international reverberation, as it allows to increase the passage of transoceanic ships by reducing waiting times from 18 to 11 hours, and also a national impact because it strengthens economically territories adjacent to it with the construction of new seaports for the cities of Port Said, Adabiya, Al Tor and Al Arish, which will be all well connected via new rail and highway systems to Cairo, Egypt’s capital. The second one, Barcelona, over time stratifies in its urban fabrics several interventions of urban regeneration that have interrupted the historical relationship between the city and the Mediterranean sea. Thus, since 1956 and until 2013, the city government worked for a new waterfront visions and projects that could give back to the city its original nature. The goal has been achieved by realizing an advancement of the coastline through the emergence of new lands, completely upsetting the previous relationship city-sea with a new all-pedestrian area that allows easy crossing of the city, from the historic districts to the areas of new expansion.

Once again, continuing looking to the mediterranean area as well as the Euro-African intercontinental one it is possible to identity many suspended as well as consolidated landscapes with, of course, different territorial extensions. Some examples are the following: the desert landscape of the Qattara Depresson of Egypt, the deepest natural morphological depression on the African continent as well as a historical case study of Macro-engineering, still strongly discussed today. The most recent general project hypothesis looks at contemporary climate change and provides for the transformation of the desert valley into an imported saltwater-filled basin. This transformation is based on the idea of linking the depression to the Mediterranean sea by new artificial canals, in order to deviate the

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excess seawater and so to defend the Nile Delta and coastal territories from the devastation of the rising of sea water8; the TEN-T Trans-European Network which with its pan-European corridors intercepts not only the capitals of the Old Continent, but also those strategic spots for extra-continental connections; the Trans African Highway that one day, crossing the Sahara desert, will activate new systems of continental development; and finally, DESERTC9 research for the construction of an African electricity grid powered by renewable sources distributed throughout the territory.

Suspended, consolidated and in progress Euro-African landscapes in which the human continues to reaffirm the species’ ability to react by shaping his own world, a demiurge who sees in the relationship man-nature «a challenge and an answer10».

8 Cristiana Penna, “Mediterranean Sea vs Energy Landscape.

Atlantropa & the Qattara Depression of Egypt”, in Architecture and Urban Planning. (14-16 October 2019). Architecture and Urbanism: A Smart Outlook. 3rd International Conference Architecture and Urbanism (pp. 1-840).

Cairo: Ain Shams University. Available: https:// www.researchgate.net/ publication/331400041_ Mediterranean_Sea_ vs_Energy_Landscape_Atlantropa_the_Qattara_Depression_of_Egypt [accessed Mar 29 2020].

9 https://www.desertec. org 10 Cit. Arnold Toynbee.

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Well, almost a hundred years have passed since the Atlantropa project was published and quickly classified by the European community of the time as a fantastic utopia although Herman Sörgel strongly believed in the feasibility of the Euro-African scenario he proposed. It took, in fact, a century to demonstrate, first of all, that Atlantropa certainly reflects on the one hand, as a Manifesto, all those landscape design theories consolidated at the end of the twentieth century and according to which «over time the elements of transformation of the landscape figure range from climatic and seasonal variation to systems of colonization, from the exploitation of resources to phenomena of return of the natural element (the desert that buries the city or the ‘flooding’ of large territories)11». On the other hand, Atlantropa turns out to actually be a contemporary landscape partially in progress (Fig. 7).

In a comparison 1:1 with contemporaneity, the Sorgelian vision reveals its newness in: the aforementioned climatic dystopia equal and opposite to the one that the scenario of the German architect would have caused if undertaken decades ago. Where the increase in temperatures is taking place nowadays even without the drying up of the Mediterranean Sea, replaced instead by the rising of the sea level; in the project for the production and distribution of a clean energy network powered by marine currents which, today, is opposed by an in-place still hybrid system, but with long-term planning for the creation of networks increasingly powered by renewable sources; in the continental infrastructures that nowadays it is identified with the TEN-T or THA networks; in the realized and undergoing urban and territorial transformation like the contemporary ones of Dubai, Barcelona, the Qattara Depression in Egypt and finally the ones for the straits of the Mediterranean sea.

Thus, today, it is possible to feature various points on the Euro-African map by highlighting how much Herman Sörgel’s

11 Vittorio Gregotti, Progetto di paesaggio, in “Casabella” n. 575-576, p.

3, Jan, 1991.

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proposal is an in-progress reality and how these current territorial scenarios, all together, give back a fragmented Euro-African contemporary landscape. A clear result of the stratification of pre-existing and ex-novo anthropogenic and natural elements that, over time, have transformed city-territories and landscapes through an intertwining of multi-scalar processes.

Landscape scenarios in which macro-engineering and architecture reaffirm their being as well means of a social, economic and political order, giving rise to spatial balances in which every architectural and infrastructural object, new city, geo-climatic change, migratory flow are dependent on each other. Evolutions not new within the Euro-African-Mediterranean context which, in fact, has always «it was a crossroads of peoples, cultures, languages, religions that made it the beating heart of the old world [...] perhaps the most dynamic place of interaction between different Earthly societies on the face of the planet12» and which, in a moment, can take on the size of a lake or the size of an ocean that is difficult to cross.

12 Vincenzo Consolo, Franco Cassano, Rappresentare il Mediterraneo.

Lo sguardo Italiano, p. 68, Mesogea Editor, Messina 2000.

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+NL ‫ ד‬9MJ HTSYJRporary infrastructural euro-african landscape vs Atlantropa project.

Author’s drawing.

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In front of a fragmented and in-progress context as the Euro-African contemporary one, it is possible to assert that the utopian element of Atlantropa vision does not consist anymore in the technical challenge for building a dam or a bridge, that one day we will be able to build, but rather in a fundamental aspect absent in Herman Sörgel’s life-time just like nowadays: the collective consent, the acceptance of the project idea of a new coexistence of peoples and cultures where «once the idea of the achievable utopia has been accepted, the reality of the project takes over thanks to the technique1».

In the end, what must be proposed is a reflection in support of the Euro-African continental scenario without designing an immutable future reality reaching a definitive conclusion, but proposing an envisioned conclusion not truly concluded in order to generate new extraordinary future Euro-African visions.

Atlantropa 2.0 is a utopia already partially a reality in terms of territorial linking but which miss a social-political-economic fairness vision between all the countries of Europe, Africa and Middle East and based on «the Mediterranean centrality avoiding the shifting of the optics either towards a Europe-centric north or towards an Arab-centric south. To look to the future the new perspective must include an all-inclusive outlook without prejudices or claims of primates without any feedbacks2» (Figg. 8-9).

A continent placed where four great rivers meet, where great empires have written the history, where God has numerous names, where everyplace is shrouded in mythology and legends. A single land engraved and excavated in pre-historic times and in more recent eras and in which multiple cultures co-existing with each other write the new history.

1 Yona, Friedman, Utopie Realizzabili, Quodlibet, 2003, p. 23 (english translation by the author).

2 Enzo Siviero, Centralità del Mediterraneo, dalla Storia al Futuro, in “Trasporti & Cultura” n. 44, p. 7 (english translation by the author).

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ATLANTROPA 1.0

ATLANTROPA TODAY

ATLANTROPA 2.0

The new Euro-African continent thought by Herman Sörgel in which the already saturated Europe was planned to grow towards the underdeveloped Africa through the Mediterranean Sea as main link.

Two Continents, Europe and Africa, separated by the Mediterranean Sea more and more border than place of sharing and exchange.

The new Euro-African continent based on the Mediterranean centrality.

+NL ‫[* ד‬TQZYNTS TK the continental scenario: Atlantropa vs Atlantropa 2.0. Author’s drawing.

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ATLANTROPA 2.0 A Continent placed where four great rivers meet, where great empires have written the history, where God has numerous names, where everyplace is shrouded in mythology and legends. A single land engraved and excavated in pre-historic times and in more recent eras and in which multiple cultures co-existing with each other write the new history.

+NL ‫& ד‬YQFSYWTUF Map. Author’s drawing.

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ATLANTROPA Primary sources • Sörgel Herman (1929). Mittelmeer-Senkung.

Sahara Bewasserung (Paneuropa-Projekt), Gebhardt, Leipzig.

Secondary sources • Arteaga Cardineau Carlos (2014).

Atlantropa: el sueño utòpico de construir la Atlàntida. Atlantropa: The Utopian dream of building Atlantis. In: “Al Qantir” n. 16, (Geography Department, Universidad Autònoma de Madrid), pp. 176-184.

• Brook Cathcart Richard (1995). Mitigative Anthropogeomorphology: a rivived plan for the Mediterranean Sea Basin and the Sahara. In: “Terra Nova” n. 7, pp. 636-640.

• El-Kassas Mohamed (2011). The Gibraltar Barrage. Controlling the sea level of the Mediterranean would be an engineering feat and may be both possible and necessary. In: Daring to Care. Reflections on Egypt before the revolution and the way forward, a publication of the Association of International Civil Servants (AFICSEgypt), printed in Egypt by Moody Graphic International Ltd. 7, Delta st., Dokki 12311, Giza, Egypt, pp. 492-495.

• van der Vleuten Erik, Kaijser Arne (eds) (2006). Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850-2000, Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications.

• Gall Alexander (2006). “Atlantropa: A Technological Vision of a United Europe”. In: van der Vleuten Erik, Kaijser Arne (eds).

Networking Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850-2000, Science History Publications, pp. 99-128.

• Gutberlet Bernd Ingmar (2012). “Wie ein Weltenneubaumeister, Herman Sörgels Atlantropa”. In: Grandios Gescheitert, Lübbe Digital in der Bastei Lübbe GmbH & Co. KG, Düsseldorf.

• Hogselius Perkaijser, Arne Kaijser, Erik van der Vleuten (2015). Europe’s Infrastructure Transition. Economy, War, Nature, Making Europe Collection, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Lehmann Philipp Nicolas (2016). Infinite Power to Change the World: Hydroelectricity and Engineered Climate Change in the Atlantropa

•

•

•

Project. In: “American Historical Review” n. 121, Oxford Journals, pp. 73.

Petrov Antonio (2013). The Mediterranean as Expansionist Theater: The Case of Atlantropa.

In: Petrov Antonio (ed), “New Geographies” vol. 5, 165-78 [modified version of item 5].

Vidal Ricarda, Corlins Ingo (eds) (2015).

Alternative Worlds. Blue- Sky Thinking since 1900, Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern.

Wolfgang Voigt (2007). Atlantropa.

Weltbauen am Mittelmeer. Ein Architektentraum der Moderne, Membran.

UTOPIA Fantasy Utopia • Eco Umberto (2013). Storia delle terre e dei luoghi leggendari, Bompiani, Milan.

• Guadalupi Gianni, Manguel Alberto (1982). Il prosciugamento del Mediterraneo. In: Manuale dei luoghi fantastici, Rizzoli, Milan.

• Motta Luigi, Ciancimino Calogero (1932). Il prosciugamento del Mediterraneo: la guerra del mondo nell’anno 2000: romanzo del futuro, Ceschina, Milan.

Ideal Utopia • Amaro Ottavio, Attardo Maria Luisa, De Fazio Giuliana (1986). Ci sarà una volta un’isola. Viaggio verso e attraverso l’isola Ferdinandea, Edizione Mapograf, Vibo Valentia.

• Campanella Tommaso (2011). La città del sole, Edizioni REA (digital edition), L’Aquila.

• Eco Umberto (2013). Le isole dell’utopia. In: Storia delle terre e dei luoghi leggendari, Bompiani, Milan, pp. 510-547.

• Fishman Robert (1977). Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, Basic books, New York.

• Gresleri Giuliano, Matteoni Dario (1982). La città mondiale. Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier, Prima edizione, Marsilio Editori, Venice.

• Moro Tommaso (2010). Utopia, Giunti (digitale edition made by Semplicissimus Books Farm srl), Loreto (Ancona).

• Purini Franco, Marzot Nicola, Sacchi Livia (eds) (2006). La città nuova italia-y-2026.

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• •

Invito a VEMA, Editore Compositori, Bologna.

Schirren Matthias (2004), Taut Bruno.

Alpine Architecture. Eine Utopie-A Utopia, Prestel Publishing.

Tod Ian, Wheeler Michael (1978). Utopia, Orbis publishing Ltd, Londra.

Concrete Utopia • Bloch Ernst (2010). Lo spirito dell’Utopia, Seconda Edizione, Rizzoli (“BUR Alta Fedeltà” series), Milan.

• Galli Giovanni (luglio 2017). Spazio e società (e utopia). In: “Viceversa. L’attualità dell’utopia” n. 6, Paolo Mosco Valerio, Triassi Claudio (eds), LetteraVentidue Edizioni, p. 83.

• Gerstner Alexandra (2011). A Paneurope of Supermen. Coudenhove-Kalergi’s European Vision.

In: Nate Richard, Klüsener Bea (eds), Culture and Biology. Perspectives on the European Modern Age, Würzburg, S. 131-146 (Eichstätter Europastudien).

• Gregory Paola (luglio 2017). Per una Utopia Concreta. In: “Viceversa. L’attualità dell’utopia” n.

6, Paolo Mosco Valerio, Triassi Claudio (eds), LetteraVentidue Edizion, p. 181.

• Heinze-Greenberg Ita(2002). An artistic European Utopia at the abyss of time: the Mediterranean Academy Project, 1931-34. In: “Architectural History” n. 45, pp. 441-482.

• Levitas Ruth, (1990 ). Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia.

In: “Utopian Studies”, v. 1, n. 2, Penn State University Press, pp. 13-26.

• Nicolin Pierluigi, (luglio 2017). Dentro l’Utopia. In: “Viceversa. L’attualità dell’utopia” n.

6, Paolo Mosco Valerio, Triassi Claudio (eds), p. 121.

• Pala Giacomo, (luglio 2017). Utopia: immaginazione, architettura e critica dell’attualità.

In: “Viceversa. L’attualità dell’utopia” n. 6, Paolo Mosco Valerio, Triassi Claudio (eds), p. 155-163.

• Van Lente Dick, (2010). A Chance for Utopia: Modern Technology and the Design of the IJsselmeerpolders. In: Kemperink Mary, Vermeer Leonieke (eds), Utopianism and the Sciences, 1880-1930, Leuven, S. 107-124 (Groningen Studies in Cultural Change, 37).

• White Ralph, The Europeanism of CoudenhoveKalergi. In: Stirk Peter M.R. (ed), European Unity in Context. The Interwar Period, London, New York, S. 23-40.

LANDSCAPE • • •

• • •

Bonesio Laura (2007). Paesaggio, identità e comunità tra locale e globale, Editore Diabais (“Terra e mare” series), Parma.

Clèment Gilles (2005). Manifesto del Terzo paesaggio, Quodlibet, Macerata.

García-Germán Trujeda Javier (2010). De lo mecànico a lo termodinamico. Por una definiciòn energética de la arquitectura y del territorio, Editorial Gustavo Gill, SL, Barcelona.

Jakob Michael (2009). Il paesaggio, Il Mulino, Bologna.

Norberg Schulz Christian (1986). Genius Loci. Paesaggio Ambiente Architettura, Electa, Milan.

Nougé Joan (2013). El Paisaje en la cultura contemporanea, Gruppo editorial Biblioteca Nueva, Madrid.

ARTIFICIAL LANDSCAPE • •

•

•

De Maria Luciano (ed) (2000). Marinetti e il futurismo, Editore Mondatori (“Oscar moderni” series), Milan.

Facchinelli Laura, (2016). Grandi attraversamenti. In: “Trasporti & cultura. Rivista di architettura delle infrastrutture nel paesaggio” n. 44, Editore Laura Facchinelli, Verona, p. 5.

Godoli Ezio (1983). Guide all’architettura moderna. Il Futurismo, Laterza (“Grandi opere” rivista di architettura delle infrastrutture nel paesaggio), Bari.

Guarascio Maurizio, Siviero Enzo (2016).

I grandi attraversamenti che trasformano I missing links in fixed links. In: “Trasporti & cultura.

Rivista di architettura delle infrastrutture nel paesaggio” n. 44, Editore Laura Facchinelli, Verona, pp. 9-15.

MEDITERRANEAN SEA • •

Blaeu Joan (2010). Atlas Maior of 1665, Taschen America Llc; Slp Rep Mu edizione.

Braudel Fernand (2002). Il Mediterraneo, Bompiani (“Collana Tascabili. Saggi” series), Milan.

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Braudel Fernand (2004). Memorie del Mediterraneo. Preistoria e Antichità, Bompiani (Collana Tascabili. Saggi), Milan.

Broodbank Cyprian (2015) Il Mediterraneo.

Dalla preistoria alla nascita del mondo classico, Einaudi (“Grandi opere” series), Turin.

Cassano Franco (2007). Il pensiero meridiano, Laterza (“Economica Laterza” series), Rome.

Consolo Vincenzo, Cassano Franco (2000). Rappresentare il Mediterraneo. Lo sguardo italiano, Mesogea editore, Messina.

Predrag Matvejevic (1998). Il Mediterraneo e l’Europa. Lezioni al Collège de France, Garzanti (“Gli elefanti. Saggi” series), Milan.

Predrag Matvejevic (2006). Breviario Mediterraneo, Garzanti (“Nuova Biblioteca Garzanti” series), Milan.

MAPS AND GEOGRAPHY • •

• •

•

Brotton Jerry (2013). Storia del Mondo in dodici Mappe, Feltrinelli (“Varia” series), Milan.

Brotton Jerry (2015). Le grandi mappe. Oltre 60 capolavori raccontano l’evoluzione dell’uomo, la sua storia e la sua cultura, Gribaudo (“Passioni” series), Assago (Milan).

Farinelli Franco (2003). Geografia.

Introduzione ai modelli del mondo, Editore Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, Turin.

Presciuttini Paola (2004). Coste del Mediterraneo nella cartografia europea. 15001900, Priuli & Verlucca (“Antica cartografia” series), Scarmagno (Turin).

Presciuttini Paola (2005). Coste del Mondo nella cartografia europea. 1500-1900, Priuli & Verlucca (“Antica cartografia” series), Scarmagno (Turin).

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Carlos García Vázquez

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Conceptually, the origin of the contemporary landscape can be dated in the decades of 1920s and 1930s. It was then when it went into crisis the 19th century romantic idea of ‘landscape’, identified with a pastoral environment gifted with high ethical values. It had been defined like that by a generation of intellectuals that used it to fight the industrialization process. But in the first decades of the next century, this battle was finally lost. From then on the modernization of the territory would not be something to be discussed, but merely organized.

Interestingly, the contemporary landscape was outlined from its very beginning as the result of a huge territorial transformation implemented with mega-infrastructures, and with the aim of channelling enormous flows of persons, materials and energies.

In ‘Planning the Fourth Migration’, an article published in the magazine The Survey in 1925, Lewis Mumford announced ‘the fourth migration’, when thanks to the expansion of the automobile, the telephone, the radio and the electricity, a big part of the population would leave the congested metropolis to be spread along the territory. The challenge, which he had assumed in 1923 when founding the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), was to proceed with this relocation of people and functions without squandering human and natural resources. To achieve this, the territory should be rethought as an unity made of landscapes, sources of energy, industries and people; should be re-defined through new infrastructure networks (mainly highways); and should be re-colonized with people and economic activities coming from the urban areas. The 19th century consideration of landscape as an ethical and aesthetic reference has given way to a strictly technical issue.

One of the main contributions of the Cristiana Penna’s research is the recognition of the Atlantropa project, for many years neglected because of its reductive association with the national-socialist ideology, as one of the earliest and most significant representations of this new landscape. As she shows, other professionals were working in the same time in the same direction: the Italian Futurists, the Dutch engineers, the American regional planners, etc. But the exceptionality and relevance of Atlantropa is out of discussion, only comparable, even if with a very different meaning, to Frank Lloyd Wright’s proposal for Broadacre City (1935). Both projects were defined in the same period, the base of both were territorial infrastructures, the aim of both was easing territorial mobility, and only both of them were able to outline a holistic vision of the contemporary landscape that unveiled its brutal scale and strength.

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It is also truth that both, Atlantropa and Broadacre, are considered to be mere utopias, but, as Penna says: «[Sörgel] was looking at this future Europe’s development as a possible reality. And precisely this orientation to reality becomes the guideline of the following PhD research that, from here on will expose the Herman Sörgel’s project in its entirety, in order to define its contemporary meaning as part of a reality in progress»1.

In fact, the up-to-dateness of Atlantropa persists today.

Penna dedicates the second part of her research, ‘De-constructed Landscapes, Moderns and Contemporaries’ to demonstrate it: the human migration – the ‘fifth migration’? – that is taking place from Africa to Europe, the ecological crisis in the Mediterranean Basin, and, once again, the trust in mega-infrastructures as the main way to tackle with these problems. The energy projects in the Nile Delta, the Trans-African Highways project, the New Suez Canal, the Strait of Messina’s Bridge, the artificial islands of the Sicily Canal, the Strait of Tiran’s Bridge [...] the collection of all these fragments reminds a sort of in progress reconstruction of the Sörgel’s utopia.

More surprisingly yet is the endurance of Sörgel’s conceptual interpretation of the contemporary landscape. Particularly interesting is his perception of the Mediterranean landscape as something fluid and changing, where there were plenty of dynamic relationships between elements and systems. This interpretation of the landscape as a flux of energy flows, as a stratification of fields of action, matches the most contemporary appeals of the landscape theorists to pay more attention to the changing processes than to the static ones.

To sum up, and as Cristiana Penna concludes: «Atlantropa is not a fantastic utopian vision, but a concrete one. Atlantropa is a contemporary de-constructed landscape in progress»2.

1-2 Cristiana Penna Ph.D. Thesis, Atlantropa 2.0_The New Mediterranean Continent. A contemporary [de] constructed landscape: the concrete utopia [in-progress].

Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria (Italy), Department of Architecture and Territory (dArTe). Ph.D. Course in Architecture and Territory (XXX academic cycle).

Supervisors: Prof. Ottavio Amaro, Prof. Carlos G. Vazquez.

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Richard Brook Cathcart

*HRJUDSKRV BURBANK, CALIFORNIA, USA AFTERWORD

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The “Afterword”, first recorded in English-language dictionaries circa 1885 AD, is usually meant to be a decorative, enriching excursus focused on the historical and cultural context of a single publication to which it is attached as the final statement of a standalone treatise. In other words, “Afterword”-writers do have an option to usurp the tome’s author; therefore, in some instances, it is both a serious responsibility as well as an evilly-strong temptation. However, such in not the case here! Dr. Cristiana Penna’s ATLANTROPA 2.0. The New Mediterranean Continent describes in her minutely-detailed text and laudable clear architectural diagrams and colorful informative cartography the unique, magnificently allicient Macro-Imagineering mega-project concept fully developed from circa 1927 by the German architect and engineer Herman Sorgel (1885-1952).

Her 21st Century insights are consonant with Herman Sorgel’s own human awareness of the Earth-world. Jakob von Uexkull had alleged during 1921 that the total basis of human comprehension of the perceptible environment [Merkwelt] comes through human apprehension of the effects of our species’ Earthly productions which results in Homo sapiens’ “effect world” [Wirkwelt]. The ever-more pervasive material and energy manipulations of our species nowadays extend well beyond our current bio-geophysical planetary body of seeming permanent inhabitance. If considered as an expanding sphere-shape originating centrally from Earth-world, the moving outer boundary of this sphere of human presence has already passed beyond our Sun’s 3-dimentsional region of major gravitational and particle emission contacts. Briefly, humankind’s operational effect world, as demarcated by active or defunct infrastructure only1, is comfortingly co-incident with Jakob von Uexkull’s divined perceptible environment [Merkwelt]. Macro-Imagineering, as practiced by both Herman Sorgel and Dr. Cristiana Penna, advances Macro-Engineering – that is to say from the Wirkwelt of an intelligent and hopeful life-form situated, even one might say still isolated in an Earth-world, to impact the full extent of our Universe which is still an indistinctly conceived Merkwelt. To all effects and purposes, what is being presumed in this Afterword is a further ideology: a massive macro-project affecting the entirety of the Mediterranean Sea Basin, a region of the greater Earthworld2. It is to be hoped Dr. Penna’s book will stimulate in many other readers the intense epistemic curiosity that is vitally necessary for 21st Century modernity and, subsequently, ATLANTROPA 2.0 becomes an intellectualized Macro-Imagineering concept that is a significant cultural force empowering the continued peaceful development of Science, technology innovations and personal wealth-creation benefiting all interdependent human civilization societies.

1 Gorman A. (2017). “Not all space debris is junk—a comprehensive management strategy for culturally significant spacecraft” 68th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), Adelaide, Australia, 25-29 September 2017, contribution IAC-17-, A6, 8, 2, x40612. Pages 1-10.

2 Cathcart R.B. (2018).

“Gibraltar Strait Barrier: Macro-Engineering to Regulate Future Sea-Level Rise”, Chapter 4, pages 187-216 in Petrova, Victoria M. (Ed.) Advances in Engineering Research, Volume 26.

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Planned strand-situated cities – the basis for the word “civilization” – are semi-autonomous real-world emblems of spatialized order that are usually scaled geographically by the human-body to generate a “social aura” that seems virtually primordial. Think architectural philosophy dubbed Metabolism by its Japanese originators!

On 27 February 1964, the national government of Italy requested of the worldwide Macro-Engineering community a means to prevent Pisa’s tourist-attracting Leaning Tower from toppling. A 1995 technical blunder by the designated experts nearly caused the famed bell-tower to collapse. By the early-21st Century, thankfully, the landmark Piazza del Duomo in Tuscany was righted slightly, stabilized, and its entrance reopened to tourists. Unfortunately, by 2060 the Leaning Tower may become a wave-battered icon, impacted by storm-surges because of a postulated higher-than-today Mediterranean Sea seawater level3. Once fallen, the Leaning Tower rubble will remain but a fading memory, perhaps the equivalent of Homo sapiens’ constantly accumulating and degrading planet-orbiting outer space junk, possibly joining the unbuilt Monument zur III Internationalen planned by Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) as an object of future architectural desire by professional macro-project planners4.

Tatlin’s playful 1919 tower concept, meant to be 400 meters tall, made him a contemporary of Herman Sorgel but who lacked, in this specific instance, the well-informed constructive logic displayed by the German architect, periodical editor, pamphleteer and book writer who almost perfected ATLANTROPA 1.0. Barring the development of materials with amazing properties, Vladimir Tatlin’s structure was then, and is still today, non-constructible as well as useless in terms of everyday practicality. Dr. Penna’s ATLANTROPA 2.0 is imbricated onto an Earth-biosphere undergoing spacially vast morphing, an ever-changing planet perhaps trending rapidly to Bill McKibben’s Eaarth: Making A Life On A Tough New Planet (2010).

(Our Earth is becoming so much different than before Homo sapiens’ arrival in great numbers that McKibben prescribed a new placename for our inhabited planet: “Eaarth”. Earth’s encompassing bioshell commenced to unnaturally degrade when Homo sapiens first became a gradually industrializing sea-faring species5.) Several ocean celestial bodies are present in our Solar System: the moons Enceladus and Titan, for example. Theoretical Moon and planet terraforming experts have proposed to technically induce global atmosphere warming on Mars to cause its transformation into an biota-inhabitable and ocean-bearing planet; recreation of a long-absent ocean atop Mars’ crust would also reinstate a human-caused overprinting geomorphological regime that undesirably includes

3 Reimann L. et al. (2018).

“Mediterranean UNESCO World Heritage at risk from coastal flooding and erosion due to sea-level rise” Nature Communications 9: 4161.

4 Prix W.D. (2012). Unbuildable Tatlin? Springer Vienna Architecture. 144 pages.

5 Cooper A.H. et al.

(2018). “Humans are the most significant global geomorphological driving force of the 21st century” The Anthropocene Review 5: 222-229.

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tsunamis generated by unstoppable bolide impacts and unhaltable endogenetic seismic events, Marsquakes6! Seemingly, humans have an increasing propensity to settle on Earth’s Ocean coastlines where natural and anthropogenic hazards can be devastating to invaluable lives and important infrastructures. The earliest generalized use in the English-language of “infrastructure” was circa 1927; geographos prefers to associate professionalized Macro-Imagineering with the postwar period beginning about 1920 when a true Infrastructural Revolution indisputably occurred affecting all humanity. Commencement of Herman Sorgel’s ATLANTROPA as he envisioned it would have allowed Mediterranean Sea Basin societies to ignore the macro-problem of aging infrastructures because a plethora of future options would soon be presented to all shore-dwellers.

During the 20th Century years of Herman Sorgel’s bold ATLANTROPA planning effort, his mega-project necessitated the use of unprecedently enormous volumes of concrete for the foreseen sea-dams, bridges, causeways and rebuilt or new coastal cities of the Mediterranean Sea Basin7-8. For the 21st Century public, his distinguished monumental concrete architectural style may be reminiscent of the Florentine group Superstudio’s Il Monumento Continuo (1969) or even Alberto Burri’s Il Cretto (1985-2005) located exactly covering the pre-earthquake destruction site of Gibellina, Sicily! Moderns now appreciate that artificial concrete, mixed and emplaced by Homo sapiens, is Earth’s most voluminous novel rock-type9-10. Roman piers and breakwaters composed of marine concrete >2,000 years old still endures and some installations – those that have not been entirely submerged by Nature’s post-Ice Age sea-level rise – remain and are utilized by living mariners! The oceanic crust production by Nature annually amounts to ~3-5.25 cubic kilometers but humans produce ~4 cubic kilometers yearly11!

By May 2022, our air’s carbon dioxide gas content was 50% more than what it was prior to the Industrial Revolution. It is commonly supposed that carbon dioxide gas emissions from global cement manufacture is one of the underlying main causes of the perceived Holocene Earth-atmosphere warming; however, ~43% of that gas given off by production was reabsorbed by humankind’s industrially set in-place concrete infrastructures12. Some Green design-research practices, such as Design Earth headed by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy which showed its Strait of Hormuz Grand Chessboard at the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery in New York City, USA as “Architectural Tropes Across Scales and Geographies” during 17 October-2 December 2017, demonstrated an almost Surreal concrete

6 Mchaney W.C. et al.

(2010). “Tsunamis on Mars: Earth analogies of projected Martian sediment” Planetary and Space Science 58: 1823-1831.

7 Andrew R.M. (2018).

“Global CO2 emissions from cement production, 1928-2017” Earth System Science Data 10: 22132239.

8 Cao Z. et al. (2017).

“Elaborating the History of Our Cementing Societies: An In-Use Stock Perspective” Environmental Science & Technology 51: 11468-11475.

9 Gargiani R. (2014).

Concrete, From Archeology to Invention, 1700-1769: The Renaissance of Pozzolan and Roman Construction Techniques. Routledge. 404 pages.

10 Jahren P. (2017).

History of Concrete: A Very Old and Modern Material.

World Scientific Publishing Co. Inc. 400 pages.

11 Cathcart R.B. (2011).

“Anthropic Rock: a brief history” History of Geo and Space Sciences 2: 57-74.

12 Xi F. et al. (2016).

“Substantial global carbon uptake by cement carbonation” Nature Geoscience 9: 880-883.

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architecture scheme blocking the shipping channels of the Hormuz Strait; a more practical sea-dam macro-project was bruited earlier by professional macro-engineers13. Herman Sorgel’s ATLANTROPA was intended to reveal developable new landscape bordering the former beaches, seaports and resorts of the Mediterranean Sea as well as to emplace gigantic hydro-electricity facilities in its various narrow and shallow sea-straits. 21st Century societies depend on critical life-support infrastructures – geographically large-scale intertied systems that supply continual services (electrical power, mobility fuels, long-distance communications et cetera) crucial to civilization’s functioning and expansion. On 28 September 2003 all Italy suffered an electricity supply failure, a complete nationwide blackout caused by a single tree in Switzerland that toppled onto a major international power-line feeding the nation’s grid! Under Herman Sorgel’s scheme nearly every European nation, as well as northern Africa, would have been interconnected with unlimited electric power transmission capacities – failure was not an option then and remains so today as well as into the unpredictable future14!

It is generally speculated that daily peak electrical use (loadings) of the Mediterranean Sea Basin will probably increase and overall electric-power consumption will shift geographically from northern Europe to southern Europe15 due to an apparently, or evidently, impending regional climate change regime directly related to compleat Earth-atmosphere warming. The point being that, even during 2022, our life-line support networking technology is insufficient to insure infrastructure service reliability anywhere. This fact of everyday life has fostered an as yet uncertainly evaluated amount of civilization-disturbing techno-phobia amongst some imperfectly informed segments of the world-public16. Nevertheless, supercomputer climate models illustrate that huge wind-power and solar-power installations, whenever emplaced on the combined Sahara and Sahel landscape of northern Africa, would increase regional air temperature, precipitation and vegetation; following that data output, the digital modelers assumed the installations affixed to >9 million square kilometers of desert and Sahel drylands would likely generate 82 TW, about 4.5 times civilization’s 2017 energy production17! Windmills could even be partly decorated like some cellular communications towers, disguised as palm trees – see USA Patent 3,144,375 awarded to Guy C. Day on 11 August 1964 – literally festooning the transmogrified landmass vastness made inhabitable!

13 Schuiling R.D. et al.

(2005). “The Hormuz Strait Dam Macroproject—21st Century Electricity Development Infrastructure Node (EDIN)?”

Marine Geosciences and Geotechnology 23: 25-37.

14 Walter K. and Bosch S. (2013). “Intercontinental cross-linking of power supply—calculating an optimal power line corridor from North Africa to Central Europe” Energy, Sustainability and Society 3: 14.

15 Wenz L. et al. (2017).

“North-South polarization of European electricity consumption under future warming” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science [USA] 114: e7910-e7918.

16 Khasawneh O.Y. (2018). “Technophobia: Examining its hidden factors and defining it” Technology in Society 54: 93-100.

17 Li Y. et al. (2018). “Climate model shows largescale wind and solar farms in the Sahara increase rain and vegetation” Science 361: 1019-1022.

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Dr. Cristiana Penna’s ATLANTROPA 2.0 could be materialized using concrete, but more simply realized by means of advancing digital-printing concrete-textile technologies unknown to her immediate Mediterranean Sea Basin macro-project conceptual predecessor Herman Sorgel. Like few others before, Dr. Penna seeks to evoke realistic responses from readers so that the present-day’s resolute people trustingly embrace Bill McKibbens’ planet future EAARTH and, furthermore, to firmly believe in Macro-Imagineering’s feasible envisioned transformations of our common Wirkwelt.

Possibly the only other ongoing civilization macro-project even approaching the size and complexity of Dr. Penna’s ATLANTROPA 2.0 is China’s initiative for the Silk Road Economic Belt18 in the Old World and the incomplete Pan-American Highway located in the New World19. And, it is in the New World that geographos supposes the creation of a prototype, a rough approximation of the bulky sea-dam Dr. Penna may hope, or not, to design and construct. After all the sure-to-be-spectacular near-vertical impermeable barrier installed in the Strait of Gibraltar is a kind of wall and recently it has become inexpensive to build walls of all kinds, shapes and bulk using 3-dimensional digital-printing devices exuding cement20. The vision of 3-dimensional printing of various infrastructure – that is, the synthesis of solid objects by additive deposition of treated granular and fluid binders – was first confirmed as a proven structural macro-engineering technique during 1983-198821-22. Ordinarily, automated 3-dimensional digital printers emit rope-like extrusions – in other words, imitating to some degree the familiar textile machines that fabricate fine Italian fabrics. Increasingly, concrete structures are reinforced by cement impregnated with textiles23-27. Since the Mediterranean Sea Basin is prospectively assumed to become affected by climate change it is, therefore, to be presumed that increased drought frequency and the migration of people to coastal cities will result in some social macro-problems that require macro-resolutions imagined by macro-project dreamers28-29. However, a word of caution is advisable: the IPCC has incorrectly adopted the magnitude and the sign of our Earth’s air temperature forcing associated with historical land-cover changes30 which means for Macro-Imagineering’s investigators, at the very least, that some past projected climate change affects (as coarsely related to real-world severely deleterious landscape effects) are suspect indicators! Thus, some published projections are incredible documents. It is interesting that an Italian, Dr. Cesare Marchetti (born 1927) was the first to suggest the idea of direct disposal of carbon dioxide (extricated from Earth’s air) into the North Atlantic Ocean by industrial-scale

18 Sternberg T. et al.

(2017). “Central Asian ‘Characteristics’ on China’s New Silk Road: The Role of Landscape and the Politics” Land 6: 55-71.

19 Rutkow E. (2019).

The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas. Scribner. 439 pages.

20 Goodbun J.C. (August 2016). “Mud and Modernity” Arena Journal of Architectural Research 1: 4.

21 Mohammed J.S. (2016).

“Applications of 3D printing technologies in oceanography” Methods in Oceanography 17: 97-117.

22 Damme H.V. (2018).

“Concrete material science: Past, present, and future” Cement and Concrete Research 112: 5-24.

23 Frost J.D. et al. (2017).

“The evolving role of materials in geotechnical infrastructure systems” Journal of Structural Integrity and Maintenance 2: 89-99.

24 Koutas L.N. et al.

(2019). “Strengthening of Concrete Structures with Textile Reinforcing Mortars: State-of-the-Art Review” ASCE Journal of Composites for Construction 03118001: 1-20.

25 Grell M. et al. (2019).

“Autocatalytic Metallization of Fabrics Using Si Ink, For Biosensors, Batteries and Energy Harvesting” Advanced Functional Materials 29: 1804798.

26 Cramer W. et al.

(2018). “Climate change and interconnected risks to

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injection of carbon dioxide into the outflowing high-density seawater undercurrent which could then spill over the sill in the Strait of Gibraltar; Marchetti of course knew such a macro-project would not be successful if it infused surface-layer North Atlantic Ocean seawater flowing in the opposite direction into the Mediterranean Sea31-32. Always astute, Dr. Marchetti understood the geological history of the Gibraltar Strait33 and comprehended that the entrapment of 6% of the world-ocean’s salts in what remained of the Tethys Ocean during the Messinian “Salinity Crisis” of more than 5 million years ago probably set the oceanographic parameter which imposes our world’s climate during the Holocene. The “Salinity Crisis” was the terminal geographical isolation of relic former seafloor basins of the latitudinally constrained Tethys Ocean. Dr. Cristiana Penna has anticipated that realization of Herman Sorgel’s old-fashion ATLANTROPA macro-engineering project restarts Nature’s previous massive seawater evaporation Earth-bioshell process-event: in short, ATLANTROPA is merely inspirational, not doable for good reasons, espoused or published. Humans today, everywhere, struggle with global air warming by simplistic, infrequently successful weather modification activities lest our planet come to resemble the climate prevailing during the “Salinity Crisis”: the Tables of Earth Air Pressure found in the US Government publication U.S. Standard Atmosphere, 1976 includes tables estimating air pressure found at 5 kilometers below present-day sea-level, along with equations used to derive the Tables. Using the equations in that model, geographos notes that the pressure 5.3 kilometers below 2022’s sea-level would be ~1.81 atmospheres and the mean air temperature would be ~49 °C. Aerial carbon dioxide gas is abstractable from air by the use of textile-based filters that combine cotton fabric and an enzyme, carbonic anhydrase34 By regulating both the Mediterranean Sea’s surface-layer inflow/under-current outflow of seawater simultaneously, any type of sea-dam – whether a concrete gravity dam or a textile parachute dam in which the upper end of the Dyneema Composite Fabric35 membrane is fixed to a floating boom and restrained by guys-emplaced within the Strait of Gibraltar will function much like a revolving door, a type of air-lock36 and force a sudden terracing somewhere in that narrow water gap separating Spain and northern Africa. Frei Otto (1925-2015) became a freelance architect during 1952 and had perfected the tension-loaded parachute dam macro-project concept by 1953. Per Cited Reference #3 of this supportive afterword, geographos hereby suggests

sustainable development in the Mediterranean” Nature Climate Change 8: 972-980.

27-28 Voltz M. et al.

(2018). “Mediterranean land systems under global change: current state and future challenges” Regional Environmental Change 18: 619-622.

29 Barcikowsk M.J. et al.

(2019). “Changes in the future summer Mediterranean climate: contribution of teleconnections and local factors” Earth System Dynamics. https://doi. org/10.5194/esd-2018-85.

30 Lejeune Q. et al.

(2018). “Historical deforestation locally increased the intensity of hot days in northern mid-latitudes” Nature Climate Change 8: 386-390.

31 Marchetti C. (1977).

“On Geoengineering and the CO2 Problem” Climatic Change 1: 59-68.

32 Palmieri J. et al. (2015).

“Simulated anthropogenic CO2 storage and acidification of the Mediterranean Sea” Biogeosciences 12: 781-802.

33 Krijgsman W. et al.

(2018). “The Gibraltar Corridor: Watergate of the Messinian Salinity Crisis” Marine Geology 403: 238-246.

34 Shen J., Yuan Y. and Salmon S. ( June 2022).

“Carbonic Anhydrase Immobilized on Textile Structured Packing Using Chitosan Entrapment for CO2 Capture” ACS Sustainable Chemistry Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1021/ acssuschemeng.2c02545.

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a New World sea-dam test-site at Venezuela’s Golfo de Cariaco for the Old World’s most audacious macro-project ATLANTROPA 2.0. (“Little Venice” is geographically close to the Guiana Space Centre opened in 1968 to serve chiefly western European rocket launch needs.) Golfo de Cariaco, only 623 square kilometers in area, both in regional climate and bathymetry strongly resembles a miniature Mediterranean Sea Basin and could economically serve teams of macro-engineers, some members of which may be professionally focused on desalination factory development, as well as other persons working at the proving-ground to perfect our Earth’s first Wirkwelt suspended cement-infused fabric sea-dam technology that is entirely suitable for the prevailing bio-geophysical conditions of the Mediterranean Sea Basin’s Strait of Gibraltar37.

35 Iannucci L. et al.

(2018). “Understanding the Thickness Effect on the Tensile Strength Property of Dyneema HB26 Laminates” Materials 11: 1431.

36 Haese A. (2019).

“Revolving entrance doors: Machines or structural elements?” Glass Structures & Engineering 4: 17-27.

37 Cathcart R.B. (Dezembro 2018). “Solar Thermal-powered Desalination Fountain-Barge: Macro-Imagineering NE Venezuela’s Golfo de Cariaco” CALIBRE—Revista Brasiliense de Engenharia e Fisica Aplicada.3: 10-19.

Printed in october 2023

by PressUp, Nepi (VT)