AIRE : The River and its Double

South of Geneva, Switzerland, the Aire River runs across a plain that for centuries has been agricultural land. Since the late nineteenth century, the waterway has been embanked for flood protection, which has caused a gradual loss of habitat for a large variety of plants and animals. In 2001, a decision was made to renaturalize the river. Yet rather than merely reconstructing the river’s former natural bed, Superpositions, the association of firms commissioned with the project, applied “topographic imagination,” a method that combines the embanked channel with a newly designed pasture landscape.


This new book documents that renaturalization project through drawings, images of construction work, and images of the new waterway. Essays and commentary by international contributors Jean-Marc Besse, Lorette Coen, Gerorges Descombes, G. Mathias Kondolf, Elissa Rosenberg, Gilles A. Tiberghien, and Marc Treib demonstrate how the restored river has been transformed, becoming again a characteristic feature of this landscape on the fringe of the city.

Georges Descombes is an architect and landscape designer, and professor of architecture at the University of Geneva. He has taught as a visiting professor at Amsterdam’s Berlage Institut, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Julien Descombes is an architect and landscape designer and cofounder of Atelier Descombes Rampini in Geneva. Corinne Van Cauwenberghe is a civil engineer and a director with B+C Engineers in Geneva. Vincent Correnti is a civil engineer and head of underground and road construction with ZS Ingénieurs civils in Geneva. François Gerber works as an environmental engineer with BIOTEC Biologie appliquée in Delémont, Switzerland.