(Review) Éric Alonzo, The Architecture of the Road, History and Theories (2018)
L’architecture de la voie. Histoire et Théories (“The Architecture of the Road, History and Theories”) is the bold title of a French volume that Éric Alonzo, PhD, teacher at the School of Architecture of Marne-la-Vallée (Paris), and co-founder, with Sebastien Marot, of Marnes, documents d’architecture, published in 2018 for the Editions Parenthèses in Marseille, France.
The central argument of the essay is made clear within the first pages: the road is not only a civil engineering product, but a veritable architectural artifact, both in the sense of a system of built objects and as a field of related practical and theoretical knowledge.
If the road has longtime been considered as the archetype of the infrastructure, Alonzo maintains that its design, “in its concrete and tangible dimension, was experienced, invented or theorized as a matter of architecture”.