227_Irene Rodriguez: Calambur_A dream for an Industrial Estate
Irene Rodriguez
Calambur_A dream for an Industrial Estate
Urtinsa is an Industrial Estate placed in Alcorcón, a peripheral city near Madrid. Its degradation has been taking place for years, but new dynamics provoked by the users themselves are re-owning and transforming the pre-existing context. How could the architect take advantage of this processes, generating a new city and at the same time not forgetting the industrial estate's past and history?
This project focuses on the tools that would be needed to allow the union of the users’ unconscious desires into one, so that the dream city ‘’created by everybody and for everybody’’, as Jane Jacobs would say, becomes possible. How to come up with the strategies that will turn An Industrial Estate into a contemporary and dynamic city?
My work reflects not only about architecture itself, but about systems. Systems that could allow the architect guide the user, but let the latter customize his own living space at every scale. The ''Calambur'', a Spanish literary figure, is the tool that the architect uses to rearrange and reinvent the ordinary urban elements to adapt them to a degraded industrial fabric.
Calambur. A dream for an Industrial Estate consists of a global intervention which adapts to the pre-existing situations, reinterpreting and reformulating the links and relations between a series of elements of the fully-fledged city. It is composed of a set of small interventions lodged in platforms of great dimensions that are based on the voids and abandoned spaces of the Industrial State, aiming to respect the dynamics taking place in the warehouses and giving importance
The calambur, a Spanish literary device, is used as a reinterpretation tool to generate new combinations between the urban elements of the city, and those of the preexisting Industrial State, seeking a systematization of the strategy, with the objective of converting the domestic, the small, into a seed that will extend and materialize as a great synergistic whole. The question is then… How to adapt the elements of an already fully-fledged city, providing sustainable growth basis, to a degraded industrial fabric, without completely forgetting its character and its past?
By changing the order of the words or elements of a sentence, the calambur completely transforms its meaning. The project deals with three different sources that will be rearranged by this principle: - First of all, the urban islands, buildings that serve the purpose of a patch to correct the deficiencies of the peripheral urbanism in Madrid. They do not relate properly with the rest of the city, but numerous situations occur inside them at different scales.
Through their analysis and fragmentation, we will obtain one of the tools for the awakening of the New City.
Secondly, The elements of the Advanced Neighbourhood; identified as self sufficiency, energy efficiency, high quality public transport, green spaces, porosity, absence of monotony, pedestrian empowerment, programmatic variety and easy orientation.
The aim is to obtain the basic measures to provide their existence. Thirdly, the pre-existing and its advantageous and interesting situations.
