May be because we wanted to distinguish divisare from the web that is condemned to a sort of vertical communication, always with the newest architecture at the top of the page, as the "cover story," "the focus. Content that was destined, just like the oh-so-new architecture that had just preceded it a few hours earlier, to rapidly slide down, day after day, lower and lower, in a vertical plunge towards the scrapheap of page 2. Our model was the bookcase, on whose shelves we have gathered and continue to collect hundreds and hundreds of publications by theme.
Every Collection in our Atlas tells a particular story, conveys a specific viewpoint from which to observe the last 20 years of contemporary architecture. A long, patient job of cataloguing, done by hand: image after image, project after project, post after post.
Behind all this there is the certainty that we can do better than the fast, distracted web we know today, where the prevailing business model is: "you make money only if you manage to distract your readers from the contents of your own site. Its helicoidal architecture on the surface exerts a centripetal force on the urban fabric which draws it towards the space that has been completed underground.
The large concrete cylinder with its moulded wall, flooded with light, is traversed, and enlivened by footbridges and escalators. Here, the sky of this inverted skyscraper is simply the ground level of the city. Natural light pours all the way down to the platforms located some fifty meters below. The sky is above the railways. This exposed infrastructure is given maximum visibility and incorporates the logic of construction.
The architectural layout is part of the urban cityscape. By erasing in the ground and prolonging uses and views between the surface and the subterranean domain, it unifies the vertical dynamics of access to the transport network. The architectural treatment transfigures this infrastructure now become architecture. It frees the horizon and disappears from the urban silhouette, swallowing up with it then bit of sky. The Groundscape and the territory Today, the Grand Paris Express is the largest project of civil engineering in Europe including over km of automated lines and 68 new stations.
