The Dark Line is not merely a mobility infrastructure: it is a space suspended between the natural and the built, between the memory of a disused railway and the possibility of a new territorial narrative. Its sober and precise project proposes a way of traversing the site that intensifies the relationship with its surroundings, offering an immersive experience that transforms the perception of the landscape.
The articles gathered in this volume analyze its architectural and urban qualities and place it within a constellation of contemporary references — infrastructural reuse, active landscape design, and cultural activation of the territory. Through critical analyses and an interview, the multiple voices featured here reveal why The Dark Line was deserving of this recognition.
This collection also seeks to highlight the role played by the METALOCUS Award and its architectural criticism as a space for dissemination, interpretation, and the construction of a vision of contemporary architecture. At a time when works circulate rapidly through images, this book stands in favour of the written word as a way to pause, exceptionally, and deeply understand and appreciate the projects that shape our environment.
What follows is the book’s foreword:
Índice del libro, The Dark Line. Editado por METALOCUS.
Chance and necessity through repetition and geometry
Primitive, archaic modernity as the avant-garde
"Everything that exists in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity", this quotation from Democritus begins the essay “Chance and Necessity”, written by the biologist Jacques Monod, who had won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine five years earlier. The book was first published in France in 1970 and its first sentence was inspired by the quotation attributed to the Greek philosopher. That reference has been carefully chosen as it summarises a mechanistic view that ratifies the idea that natural phenomena, such as those generated in biological processes, do not obey a divine plan or a specific purpose, but are the result of the combination of necessary causes and random events.
Appropriating Monod’s quote, I will use this interesting idea as a starting point for developing the foundations on which the architecture of this intervention, The Dark Line (designed by Spanish-French architects Miquel Batlle and Michèle Orliac, of mICHELE&mIQUEL, in collaboration with Taiwanese architect Chung-Hsun Wu of dA VISION DESIGN), set in a landscape so anthropised and natural as the Taiwanese one, can be objectified, experienced, explained and understood from an abstract perspective, underlining the importance of randomness for its capacity to adapt and hybridise with the environment and also as a basis for the transformative actions that are necessary for the development and construction of the project.
The project is located in the heart of the mountainous region set between the cities of Taipei and Ylan in the east of Taiwan island. It is a region that has historically been crossed and transformed by different paths, including railways used to connect to the attractive coalfields of the coal industry during the 20th century. The loss of value of fossil fuels caused the mines to be closed at the end of the last century, which in its turn caused the abandonment of the railways and all the infrastructure that had been used to enable the transport of both goods and people.
"The Dark Line, michele&miquel, dA Vision Design" by José Juan Barba.
The Dark Line links the old sites and infrastructures that sprinkle and connect the past routes of this area that had been forgotten. This recovery allows us to discover the industrial memory, the heritage of the place, while at the same time facilitates and appreciates the landscape of the mountains, gorges and waterfalls of this region, through actions that revitalise an area affected by the disappearance of the coal industry. The project partially involves the route between Mudan and Sandiaoling, passing through an old mine tunnel and a new suspended walkway clinging to the slopes of the Keelung River.
The violence of architecture on the environment (in the sense that Ignasi de Solà-Morales commented in AnyWay in 19931), meaning its capacity to violate, transform and colonise is reduced. Obviously it does not avoid the anthropisation that all founding acts in architecture entail, but it becomes more sensitive, more attentive and in dialogue with our environment. It becomes a truly functional and at the same time more natural architecture2.
This archaic beauty of the project, its primitivism, its avant-garde quality and its extraordinary interest are explained in the texts that follow in this book. Exceptional guests show us a multifaceted journey, bringing together a singular action in our way of building the modern project, the contemporary project in which a more intimate dialogue is established and proposed with nature, with the climate, with the passing of time, with our memory generated from the interaction of individuals with spaces, allowing us to build ‘ma’, in a new culture of ‘places’ full of new opportunities to create architectures with an interpretation away from the discourse of form and closer to people.
1. Barba, José Juan. «CONGRESO ANYWAY. La ciudad de las ciudades». Barcelona: Fundación Arquia, 2019.
2. Juan Antonio Cortés and María Teresa Muñoz would comment on a functional yet organic architecture in: ‘La repetición en la arquitectura moderna’. Madrid: COAM, March-April 1981, pp. 57-59.
