Runner-up Europan 17, Madrid
rellam + Jesús Lazcano
Team Andrea Gimeno, Lluís J. Liñán, Xevi Lluch, Jesús Lazcano Year 2023
Scenes of the peripheral city
What happens if we position the site, located in the district of Carabanchel, as at the core of the city? When the periphery becomes the center, what city do we get?
With 35.000 people living in 80 ha, this is an extremely dense urban chunk –one of the densest in the entire Madrid region. And yet, there are just a handful of buildings that raise above 6 floors. These buildings are host to a vibrant cultural scene, with several galleries, many creative ventures and the highest amount of music rehearsal studios in Europe. This is a diverse city too, with a fourth of the population coming from countries other than Spain; if it weren’t for their lower incomes, we could perfectly be speaking about the ‘actual’ city center of Madrid.
Unconscious places
Unlike the center, however, the peripheral city has no gardens or historic parks. It is an impervious island, removed from the network of green areas of the region. At least, officially: the few public spaces that are defined as ‘parks’ in the municipal cartography present some trees, but are completely paved on the ground level. There are, however, many vacant lots -the scars of decades of second class planning and collective indifference, tenaciously established as a defining element of this and other cities that emerged in the periphery of the metropolis. Can we think of them as a collective cultural marker of the peripheral city?
Combined, all these lots weave an unconscious network spanning over 29,033 m2 of pervious, changing, and organic ground.
The value of the wasteland.
In the peripheral city, the vacant lot is a precious asset. But not because of its potential for being developed, but because of its potential to remain empty, pervious, fertile, green, porous, accessible.
This project aims to harvest this potential, and poses itself to respond the following questions:
What happens if we turn wasteland into landscape? Can we think of the vacant lot not as the ground for a future building, but as a unique kind of public space?
Strategies of the void.
We would like to preserve and enhance the empty spaces in the area. To achieve this goal, the built and the void establish a new kind of agreement, whereby the essential traits of wasteland –informality, fertility, strangeness, ambiguity, emptiness, opportunity, fluctuation– become tactics to dignify the vacant lots, and guidelines to develop them. These tactics are necessarily site specific, but the inventory above, with its abstraction, offers the possibility of extrapolating them to other peripheral cities.
No man’s land.
The vacant lots are internal to the city yet external to its everyday use. They remain unproductive, waiting for some economic attention to become useful. At least if we think of them from a human perspective. If we separate from that perspective, however, they appear to be extremely productive for other agents and functions. First and foremost, as the nodes of a neglected ecological network serving insects, birds and soils.
With some minor operations, we propose to draw a different kind of attention on these voids, just the right amount to provide this network with a sense of identity and public recognition.
Deep surfaces
This project is all about the surface. A cosmetic intervention of the vacant areas on and around the site.
Like all cosmetics, however, the intervention goes beyond what is visible: it moistures the skin –or, in other words, it hydrates the soil by using pervious paving solutions that filter water– it freshens the air around –the preservation and enhancement of empty areas mobilize air and humidity–, and it catches the eye –the embellished vacant lots turn into seductive devices that aspire to gather both attention and collective activities. The shade of the intervention is terracotta: a range of red colors that connect to the brick facades that wrap most buildings in Carabanchel.
Fit Architecture.
The proposed agreement between the built and the void establishes clear conditions for the new constructions: they must get in shape, slimming down as much as possible in order to make room for absence. And yet, without renouncing its ability to repair the urban fabric and to catalyze public activities.
Inevitably, such agreement results in a compression of built cubic meters with important programmatic implications: different functions will need to coexist within the same spaces. Also, those functions typically associated with public space: playgrounds, courts, plazas… To facilitate this coexistence, the new buildings provide a variety of outdoor and indoor spatial conditions using a repetitive tectonic palette.
Fitness urbanity
Generally, fitness is defined as the act of shaping the body through training and workout. If we think of it from an urban perspective, however, fitness invites us to consider the ways in which we engage the cities and buildings that we use i an everyday basis. How are the structures that shape us? To what extent do they contribute to enjoyable routines? How do they influence our physical and mental health?
In an area booming with spaces that focus on the mind (art galleries, studios, workshops, etc.) the intervention focuses on the body: 50% of the proposed cubic meters are devoted to sports, leisure, play, seduction.
Plan
A possible future for the core of Carabanchel, where the public and private lots around the project area are developed following the guidelines implemented in the proposal. The scheme presents the same built area already planned by the municipality; however, this area is organized in a way that fosters porosity and enhances the vacant lots as the main platform of public space. An expanded version of Plaza de Almodóvar, taking on a presence that makes it recognizable from a metropolitan viewpoint.
No-Plan
The new built structures are not designed to accommodate specific functions, but to produce a diverse set of spatial conditions: interior, exterior, covered, open, high, low, opened to the exterior, secluded, lit from above, lit laterally, rectangular, square, triangular. As shown in these diagrams, these spaces can be engaged to develop an equally diverse set of activities.
