Projects
- Embroidering the edge“Knowing, apreciating and recognizing the environment; understand, feel and claim the site, preserve, refubrish and transform the place” Yi-Fu Tuan, 1930 The place is a dynamic concept, a difuse word based on the personal experience of the scenery. A place is not only beautiful in its forms, but also in its sounds, light and sights. The area in this competition is precisely a bunch of lines knot together along the shore, creating a line, and horizon full of complexity, that trough time has become ill, transformed and blurry until showing its wounds. Complexity: it wounds, its use, its place have taken the sight away from its essence, only understood in a perceptive manner. This site’s contrast disturbs the first sight, terrifies, challenges. But it is, precisely there, where its interest and beauty is based. Drawing this place means showing all its good points and only with a few more lines of an architectural proposal show its nature. “I said: the horizon is a complex of cartesian lines. Then, he said: because we live in a box over another box, and I said: life has finally made an impenetrable labyrinth, and he added: where to know each other is a great adventure, nevertheless, I said: there will always be a place to meet up” [Gallego, Centros da Terra, 1999] The proposed area in this contest is in fact a complex of lines that amalgamate in the coast border creating a profile. This horizon of complexities has become inflammated, disrupted and entangled over time until it finally has shown his wounds. On the first sight over the territory the wounds are visible: disconnection, obstacles, high speed, marginality. A territory that the city has tried to phagocyte imposing a range of scales that collides with the site and its identity. A place where the landscape sets clues of its open sea condition, tamed in a organic way to find the human scale formed by relations of soft amalgams that -like small surprises- are discovered when walked. “The city today is the background of a frenetic activity that loses its identity, its categories, where it is easy to get lost in the image, in the flows and in the virtual, but this can’t justify the complacency behavior that gets closer to the mainstream speech that to compromise” [Juan Creus, 2007] The approach tries to resolve and heal the visible small dama¬ges in the territory as a preface to an architectonic interven¬tion. The obligatoryness of this previous analysis and prologue proposition of the project is created by the first sight of the site. A curious, interrogative, analytic and critic sight. Therefore it is a two phase proposal: the first one trying to correct the local damages acting in the globality and the second one proposing an architectonic solution linked to the scene, shedding light over its graciousness, its scale and all that makes it a proper human habitat. Preface and project are both guided to solve the exposed problems: disconnection, obstacles, interference of uses and a certain incoherence in the land-sea relation. Conceptually, the discovered problems are structural, so they affect the whole site. However, in a tangible and detailed way, there are some areas that still have their natural potential. By detecting and distinguishing the territory through its wounds and its potentialities, it becomes a whealthy area of hatches and refinements that is necessary to clean to obtain a clear dis¬tilled base to build on. The superposition of hatches perceived through a critic view creates studio zones where the interven¬tion its made consciously from a reasoned base. Finally the complex of studio zones that form a defined and clear territory through hatches, concepts and common structures allows a homogeneous intervention with punctual refinements. The proposal is defined by four conceptual interventions that materialize through the project: -Territory REstructuration -REorganization of connections and mobility -REactivation of the coast line -REvision and REarrangement of the residential fabric The ‘RE’ prefix appears in the intervention to remember the terri¬tory is full of potential and its slight wounds are the cause of its current state of decadence and deterioration. It isn’t the case of a territory that needs a massive and protagonist solution, but a site that needs to recover its natural balance where propose a sustainable, coherent and sensible solution in terms of growth and mobility. Therefore it is necessary and proposed a node-composed solution to generate a knitted and continuous solu¬tion on the site. A project that can be perceived integrated on the landscape and, at the same time, helps it to work correctly by the linking its nodes. The complexity of this territory: its wounds, its use, its position divert the sight from its essence, only understandable from a perceptive point of view. The contrast of this site is the one that destabilizes at first sight. Scares. Defies. But it is, precisely there, where all its interest and beauty resides. “In a line the world comes together. With a line the world is divided. Drawing is beautiful and terrible.” [Chillida, Open air sculptures, 2003] Drawing this territory is to reflect what is worth in this site, and, only with a few more lines from an architectural project, to show its nature. Beautiful and terrible, the project in this site is a drawn line that tries to divide the obstacle to make it disappear and to join men and sea natures. A sea that its the main character of a project conceived in a town sculpted by water.
Work history
Architect PHD
Architect & PHD
Skills
- Commercial
- Landscape
- Residential
- Teaching
- CAD
- Design
- Sketching
- Autocad
- Indesign
- Photoshop
Education
Doctoral Thesis on Countercultural, Sustainable and Avant Garde Architecture
-
MS. Arcuitecture and Refurbrishment
-
+ Show more
Awards
Runner up | Europan | ES