"Meeting Line" is the title of a project presented by Jean Nouvel and Habiter Autrement's Mia Hägg at the 13th Venice International Architecture Biennale and that moves from an investigation of Slussen, in the centre of Stockholm, Sweden, and from its main problem, modern-era traffic planning. A knot of roads with poor pedestrian access built in 1935, the area has been an inaccessible void in the centre of the city for most of the last century.
Nouvel and Hägg collaborated on a project that proposed turning the infrastructure into a public ground, creating three inhabited bridges characterised by different features and linking Gamla Stan to Södermalm.
The proposal did not win the competition as it was too radical for a urbanistically conservative and historic city. But the project used the medium of the design competition to test a powerful idea of the possibilities for public ground after modernism.
The concept of meeting lines that link neighbourhoods and allow roadways and railways to be transformed into areas of shared urban recreation, came back to my mind while looking at images from Chado Ralph Rucci's S/S 13 collection.
The latter, characterised by black and white outfits alternated to bright pink, yellow, coral and green dresses and jackets, featured quite a few pieces in which slashes opened up onto coloured lines that intertwined one with the other; multi-coloured braids decorated one jacket sleeve or a dress, while strips of leather were woven together to form tops and sweaters. Both coloured braids and transparent plastic inserts seemed to create "meeting lines", sculpting and highlighting the contours of the designs.
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