The TGV-Méditerranée, a triangle of fast tracks between Valence, Marseilles and Nîmes, opened in June. How did the TGV transform the environment, what is the quality of the new engineering works and stations, and what does the TGV network mean for the French physical environment?

Twenty years after the first, surprisingly successful high-speed track between Paris and Lyons, the TGV now races on to Marseilles and Nîmes. The Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF) – far from the neo-liberal policy that is bringing about the collapse of rail networks elsewhere – is running the line, which is owned by Réseau Ferré de France (RFF), a state corporation that was set up four years ago, and that took over not only the railways but also the SNCF's debt of twenty billion euros. It was thus that the RFF became involved in the commissioning of the building of the high-speed track, which had to meet more stringent demands than before: the landscape of southern France is vulnerable and had to be protected, and the opposition of residents to the arrival of the TGV was stubborn. The discussions that have been going on since 1989 with local authorities and environmental groups were not always able to prevent serious conflicts. Right from the first studies of the many variants, therefore, priority was given to the integration of the railway line in the landscape. In 1991 the Ministry of Transport nominated the 'tracé Querrien' – a new route, not the adaptation of an existing line – which was approved by eight experts a year later. From Valence to Avignon the line follows the Rhône valley, which already contains a motorway and two railway lines. The SNCF spent three years on meetings with residents: the five hundred bridges, viaducts and tunnels are the results of those polemics and compromises. An Enquête d'utilité publique also investigated whether the TGV served the general interest. In 1994 the project was finally declared to be in the public interest, making compulsory purchases possible: construction could get under way, and was to take six years.

Embedding in the landscape

The TGV is not only a visual burden but an acoustic one too, so attention was paid to making the train less noisy: new wheels and engines were designed, rails and sleepers were modified, and a more perfect aerodynamic profile was sketched. Compensation was paid to private individuals in a region where people spend more time in the open air than indoors: a house situated within 150 metres of the track can be sold to the SNCF for its original price, and this offer remains valid for three years. There is a limit to this compensation; the TGV is a rude intervention, sometimes a drama, for residents. Houses built on a slope, hundreds of metres from the trains pounding over the viaducts, are subjected every ten minutes to the kind of noise you expect from aircraft. New action groups have been set up, such as in Caumont-sur-Durance near Avignon, that are calling for noise barriers and the exclusive use of the latest, quieter, generation of trains.
Landscape specialist Didier Courtemanche was asked to draw up a plan for the embedding of the track in the environment. To this end he charted every type of vegetation and landscape. Courtemanche claims that 'the environment determines the railway line, not the other way around'. Local landscape architects implemented his plans, whereby ravaged zones have been redesigned, tens of thousands of trees have been planted, and in several places the TGV has been diverted through covered caissons underneath vineyards. The French railways had never tackled the environment so thoroughly, and the same is true of the architectural design of the line, which was contracted out to the architects Alain Amédéo, Jean-Pierre Duval and Charles Lavigne. They and the SNCF created the 'atelier d'ouvrages d'art', which sketched almost all of the small and large constructions and determined the 'image' of the line. This guaranteed the unity and quality of structures built by a variety of sub-contractors.

Bridges and viaducts

The TGV-Méditerranée crosses the Rhône and the Durance several times. These are large rivers in wide river beds that call for high-quality bridges and viaducts. So it was that, after a competition had been held, seven large engineering works were designed by architects, not engineers. The Viaduct des Angles, to the west of Avignon, drops from a high wall over the Rhône to land fifteen hundred metres further on the bank of the Durance. The SNCF could think of nothing better than to have the two branches of the line to part company above the river: one going to Marseilles, the other to Nîmes. Engineer–architect Jean-François Blassel and landscape architect Michel Desvigne unzipped the viaduct over its entire length, resulting in two separate roller coasters over the river. The thrills of the fair that the TGV generates at such heights are compensated by the calm rhythm of the piers that support the viaduct every hundred metres. The viaduct near Ventabren designed by Charles Lavigne is almost as big; it winds its long and steady way through a valley, firmly supported on solid hexagonal supports like Egyptian columns. The viaduct of Vernègues, where Alain Amédéo created variations with curves and bulges, is more playful: a semicylindrical block of concrete is flattened towards the ends, supported by double columns that are set closer and closer together. On the other hand, Jean-Pierre Duval's viaduct at Grenette draws a sharp line through a peaceful valley. The modernist profile of the construction contrasts with the bases beneath the columns which allude to ancient walls. The same architect used blue steel in his double bridge at Mornas and Mondragon, made of two steep, partly opened-out bow-strings. Engineer–architect Marc Mimram welded two bow-strings together with a third bow for his bridge at Garde-Adhémar. Mimram had previously built the light-as-a-feather Solferino passerelle over the Seine, and here too he follows that Parisian precedent with half ovals that blend into one another and unite the river banks in a single gesture. Bruno Gaudin, known from the restoration of the Musée Guimet, was responsible for the viaduct over the Vallée de l'Arc. His response to the nineteenth-century aqueduct Roquefavour, which closes the valley further on, was to use T-shaped concrete pillars that support seven 'upside-down' steel bows, arches on which a thin bed of concrete cuts its way through the valley in a taut, well-supported line.
These works represent the surprising cooperation between the SNCF and independent architects, although architectural freedom was constrained by the mechanical loads of the TGVs, the risk of earthquakes, and the behaviour of the rivers. Using concrete tones that match the local stone, or painting metal arches sky blue, are signs of a concern for the landscape – though this does not alter the fact that these concrete monsters stand first and foremost for the great changes a TGV entails for the landscape.

Three new stations

Is that why the new stations in the countryside near Aix-en-Provence, Valence and Avignon have been built as odes to that same southern French landscape? The stations were designed by Jean-Marie Duthilleul and Etienne Tricaud, architects from the AREP (Aménagement Recherche Pôles d'Echanges), a subsidiary of the SNCF. Duthilleul has given free rein to his long experience with stations – he worked, for example, with Rem Koolhaas on Lille-Europe. His station in Aix-en-Provence is in the first place an architectural frame for a scenic experience, consisting of little more than an aluminium roof with the fluid shape of a pagoda, supported by a double row of wooden piles, high above a motorway carved out of the red rock, which gives the location an appropriate rawness. Beneath the roof are two long glass walls. One is covered with wooden shutters to keep out the sun, but the other opens out on a panorama that shimmers in the light, with in the distance a mountain that can be picked out among thousands, the Sainte-Victoire which Paul Cézanne elevated to the status of an icon of painting. In his way, Duthilleul pays homage to the painter and to the evocative view: the flowing shape of the station roof exactly follows the silhouette of the mountain, and when seen from inside the station, that same roof profile forms a beautiful architectural frame for the famous landscape. The station at Valence is another look-out tower, focused on the heights of the Vercors, whose elongated shape it follows. It lies like a bridge over the TGV that has been dug in seven metres below it, and the structure of the red tubing, the wooden floors and ceilings, the concrete for the platforms, make the building easy to read. All of the functions are situated within an obliquely positioned volume above the rails, with a view on the onrushing trains. The station built on a high embankment at Avignon is a functional answer to the sun and the mistral. Instead of a single roof, as at Aix or Valence, it has two separate wings, connected by a subway underneath the rails. A closed 'thermal plate' of sandstone keeps the heat of the sun out of the southern wing, which is bent around the rails like a white shell. Once inside, it becomes apparent that a white wooden wall and a glass wall form an elongated arched vault in which movement is created by the horizontal curves and the rising floors. The second building, a glass pavilion, protects the northern platform from the mistral.
These stations afford protection to passengers over the whole length of a TGV, but in view of their dimensions they are remarkably modest intrusions rather than monumental architectural gestures, which have been toned down even further by the parks laid out around the stations by landscape architect Desvigne. This architectural variety raises questions, such as whether Duthilleul's work is typical of French government architecture. It is more likely that his firm – which has won competitions for the stations of Nam Seoul in Korea and Taichung in Taiwan, and which has carried out studies for stations in London and New York –possesses the requisite architectural quality and inventiveness.

A contemporary network

The view from a TGV is like a rapid series of virtual computer animations. It is a vision of landscape that is no longer cinematographic: the montage of scenes is too swift for that as the train descends and rises over another bridge, hill, vineyard or river in a matter of seconds. The link, the logic connecting the traveller with the landscape, has been severed. What is left is a serie of separate images, with its own, contemporary, quality. The same is true of the place of the TGV line in the environment: a foreign body in, beneath, above the land, but never so intimately interwoven with it as a classic railway line.
The construction of the TGV-Méditerranée cost 3.8 billion euros, but a further 5 billion has been budgeted until 2006 for the maintenance of the existing 'slow' lines and related material. Are these investments the excesses of a wasteful government, or the expression of serious thinking about transport, the environment, and the design of space that is laid down in long-term planning and consistently implemented? Undisturbed by the nervous reflexes by which the free market reacts and rules, the SNCF is able to invest for half-centuries rather than months.
Three successive networks have changed the modern world: the rail, electricity and Internet networks. Each time it was a question of looking ahead, connecting and exchanging. Each entailed immense enthusiasm and financial debacles. The TGV network, fifteen-hundred kilometres long by now, is the most contemporary form of our first industrial network, a powerful gesture of spatial design that implies changes for cities and regions, and that may even alter the map of France. The watch is mightier than the land surveyor in that new cartography of 'multipolar functional space' that reproduces a land in which Rijssel and Marseilles are moving closer together, but in which east and west are becoming remote outposts – until, that is, a TGV links them with the centre again.

© Steven Wassenaar