UNDERPASS ENG – OLYMPIADES

Inherited from 20th-century urban planning policies, an underpass is an underground structure designed to fully separate pedestrians from motorized traffic, ensuring the uninterrupted flow of vehicles.

The emergence of these substructures accompanied the reconstruction of European cities in the aftermath of the Second World War. Celebrated as a model of modernity, the automobile was the key element structuring urban development. A symbol of progress and individual freedom, it reshaped the city in its own image, imposing a strict separation of flows. Banished beneath the road, pedestrians were removed from the surface so as not to obstruct traffic: the human body had to step aside before the machine, surrendering the space to an impatient world.

Opened in Vienna in 1955, the Opernpassage was the first iconic example of an underpass in continental Europe. In the following decades, cities such as London, Bonn, Warsaw, Moscow and Rotterdam adopted these infrastructures on a large scale. Integrated into train stations, intersections, and commercial areas, their proliferation up until the 1980s reflected the ideology of a speed-oriented urbanism within cities envisioned as rational systems.

However, by the early 21st century, this model had begun to lose its relevance, and underpasses, now perceived as unwelcoming, anxiety-inducing, and at times unsanitary or unsafe, had become despised spaces.

Today, as our relationship to mobility and speed is being redefined, and as European cities rethink their public spaces around gentler forms of movement, these relics of a now-contested model raise new questions about the planning of the post-automobile city. Restoration, removal, or abandonment, approaches differ. Some have been sealed, others left to decay, while a few municipalities have attempted to rehabilitate them as cycle paths, art galleries, or commercial and cultural spaces, revealing contrasting visions of the city: to preserve, adapt, or erase these spaces inherited from a fading era.

As these infrastructures disappear, fall into decay, or are given new uses, I wish to pursue an ongoing series begun in several European cities, seeking to establish a photographic cartography of underpasses across all fifty countries of the continent. A partial index committed to preserving on analog film the singular beauty of these now dismissed and discredited spaces. To capture on celluloid their place in each country’s urban memory before it fades away; to document the vision of urban planners and architects of the 20th century, and the labor of the engineers and workers who built them; to make forever visible the memory of these places crossed by countless city dwellers from across the continent; to keep a record of this facet of our collective European history; and to preserve, beyond the critiques directed at the car-centric era, the memory of a time when speed and concrete embodied the horizon of progress and forged the impulse of renewal in a war-wounded Europe.

Vienna, Austria

Located beneath Vienna’s busiest intersection, the Opernpassage was designed by modernist architect Adolf Hoch. Inaugurated on November 4, 1955, the day before the reopening of the Vienna State Opera, the passage embodies Austria’s postwar urban optimism and represents a major step in the development of the city’s underground pedestrian infrastructure. In the 1970s, it was integrated into the U-Bahn network through the Karlsplatz interchange station, offering direct underground access to the Vienna State Opera, the Vienna University of Technology, and the Naschmarkt, the city’s largest market. Fully restored in 2013 and meticulously maintained since, the Opernpassage combines round columns, glass display windows, and a checkered floor in an example of architecture that balances refinement and functionality.

Athens, Greece

Munich, Germany

Athens, Greece

Vienna, Austria

Berlin, Germany

Opened in 1979, the International Congress Center Berlin is one of the largest convention centers in the world. Conceived by Berlin architects Ralf and Ursulina Schüler-Witte, it stands as one of postwar Germany’s landmark buildings: four years of construction and an inflation-adjusted cost of two billion euros made it the most expensive structure ever built in West Berlin. Closed since 2014 due to asbestos contamination, the building faced potential demolition before being listed as a historic monument in 2019. Tiled in vivid orange and marked by a distinctly 1970s Berlin aesthetic, its underground passages have become iconic film sets for Hollywood blockbusters such as The Bourne Supremacy, The Hunger Games, Atomic Blonde, and Captain America: Civil War.

Belgrade, Serbia

Colchester, England

Budapest, Hungary

Underpasses represent a little-known aspect of Budapest’s architectural heritage. Distinctive urban signatures, the aluljárók are a living part of Budapest’s morphology: more than a hundred exist across the city, used daily by nearly 60,000 people. The first structures appeared in the 1960s and multiplied during the large-scale modernization projects of the 1970s: the creation of expressways, the reconfiguration of major squares and intersections, and the construction of new metro lines. These passages transform into multi-level pedestrian galleries at key intersections of the metro network. They host kiosks, florists, and newsstands, serving both as small commercial spaces and as daily shortcuts through the city.

Athens, Greece

Budapest, Hungary

Athens, Greece

Hidden beneath the eight-lane Andrea Syngrou urban highway connecting downtown Athens to the Bay of
Faliron, this passage has no official name: it is simply listed by the municipality as a pedestrian underpass. A buried link under an avenue that carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles each day, it is one of the few pedestrian connections between Kallithéa and Neos Kosmos, two neighborhoods split apart by this urban cutline. Rudimentary, graffiti-covered, and often filled with trash, the underpasses of Tsimentopoli (“the city of concrete”) frequently shelter vulnerable populations and stand as witnesses to the decay of infrastruc- tures following the austerity policies implemented in Greece since the 2010s.

Berlin, Germany

Chelmsford, England

Vienna, Austria