Port, city and coast-line

Abstract

Places of expectation and hope, of arrival and departure, where the routes towards distant cities and cultures intersect; ports have to exist on a fragile destiny. As fragile as their memory is fragile. Large civil and military machines, around which the dawn of the civilisations gathered, with their emporia, their cultures, their fleets and their schools; for all their size and the imposing scale of their construction, they have to exist on a fragile and uncertain destiny.
The destiny of ports is a fragile one.
Marvellous ephemeral machines, they live off the eloquence of the landscape and its modification, its emerging, its subaltern role. For us, they are extraordinary pieces of civil mechanical engineering that have always been bound to the life of the city to form an indissoluble single body: arrayed like preparatory “first stones”, waiting for new images of the city.