Extracts from the MADRID_ABIERTO Urban Buddy Scheme sessions

6th OF FEBRUARY OF 2009
Luis Úrculo (moderator)
Studio Kawamura-Ganjavian
C.A.S.I.T.A.
Uriel Fogué
Exprimentolimon
Cecilia Andersson
Kyong Park (moderator)
Alexander Gerdel
Apolonija Šušteršič + Meike Schalk
Teddy Cruz
Kyong Park (questions)
Discussion with the audience

WUNDERKAMMER

(presentation)
…a team made up of three architectural studies: BBLAV, GIWGALVEZ and MISC. They share a working space, developing projects together in realms such as architecture, urbanism, design, landscape and teaching activities. Their collaboration is not performed in the usual manner, but is a kind of lab that integrates different ideas and experiences.
They will explain the general guidelines of their work, which is done both in common and individually. An investigation on urban utopia, understood as a transformation vector linked to reality.
They have participated in the urban research lab called “ARTEPOLIS”, through an exhibit that includes proposals from 8 architectural studios on the utopian city. For 8 months “ARTEPOLIS” has tried to reflect on how to build a city, which, designed for man, propitiates interaction. Architects, critics and researchers have integrated a work platform on the concept of city, a concept to be dealt with from a humanist point of view. “ARTEPOLIS” is a project that has been developed in Intermedie (Madrid’s City Hall), in the Matadero Centre.

(conference)
David Franco, Isabel Avichore, Luca BRunelli and Pablo Martínez, intervene.

David_ In the last decade, Madrid and its metropolitan hub have grown enormously by filling a territory which’s geography hardly offers obstacles to expansion.
All the great operations developed in Madrid have been focused, on the one hand, on a disproportionate increase in housing construction, encouraging land speculation and, on the other hand, the construction of massive infrastructures needed to supply these housing areas.
In this urban development model, based on the extensive occupation of the city’s external limits, the paradigm of sustainability and the current economic situation are shifting people’s attention towards the existing city.
Recycling and the transformation of traditional areas seem to be the most efficient modes of development in relation to consumed resources. Therefore, it seems especially convenient to rethink our methods in areas which attract citizens’ interest…Madrid’s historic downtown.
The trend in the handling and rehabilitation of these areas (not only in Madrid), public areas included, is to ‘respectfully’ build sham constructions that reproduce in an uncritical manner a series of features universally assumed to belong to a certain realm of history.
In Madrid’s downtown these interventions have been specific and aesthetic, without questioning its identity as a crystallized and finished city, dismissing any relevant change or meaningful renovation. Is it possible to conceive more intense interventions in strategic points of such areas, introducing dynamics which are better adjusted to contemporary life? Can we imagine new forms of symbioses between the traditional city and life’s current complexity?

In reality, the traditional city is already a hybrid and complex structure where the public and private realm, mingle…an unequalled reality that the modern city has been unable to surpass.
However, in some areas in downtown Madrid, what we find is an excessively homogeneous two-dimensional structure, in spite of its physical density and of use, where the lack of facilities and green areas (integrated in its fabric) involve a great pressure on local inhabitants. This triggers ‘gentrification’ processes which endanger city as a plural place.
In opposition to this we can analyze the most beautiful monuments in today’s cities…the encounter between topography and urbanism…river banks, the great urban parks and, in general, the introduction of discontinuities and three-dimensional exception.
…thus we can focus on a new view which is known by omitting historic, mythic and tourism values to understand the city as a physical structure and construct, on this hybrid notion of what three-dimensionality, new transformation tools for Madrid’s downtown.

Pablo Martínez_ The project we have brought to present, ‘TRIPTIP’, explores the possibility of two apparently opposed operations…increase the cities porosity, ‘sponging’, and increase the density of that which has been built, ‘process of three-dimensionalization’.
The natural and the artificial, the planned and the unexpected, the real and the dreamt…we have chosen the Maravillas neighbourhood; we live and work in it. Also because the virtues and defects of Madrid’s downtown are intensified in that spot…It’s a neighbourhood with an absolute lack of facilities and representative public areas, with a homogeneous and compact fabric…therefore we conceive it as a generic environment, a scarcely qualified and neutral background to maximize radical change operations, triggering internal development and the renovation of Madrid’s centre.

Isabel Avichor_ and if a new vision on the role of Nature in the city enabled us to transform the main axis of the Maravillas Neighbourhood into a soft and flexible area focused on pleasure more than on simple circulation? We suggest a new type of urban space which combines the intense density of activities (typical of downtown Madrid) with a more smooth and cosy physical quality.

We start off from the street of San Bernardo. Due to its size it hides a great potential to be transformed in a radical way…usually taken by slow and irritating traffic, it’s the areas’ worst public spot.
Maybe it would suffice to pedestrianize the area while lining some blocks in its margins…it would be a lineal garden which solved the lack of green areas in downtown Madrid.
This new green, soft and inviting fabric that climbs through the walls, multiplying the surface for a new relation with the urban and rural realms, producing an urban three-dimension milestone.
A system of towers superposed on the existing urban framework producing a new perceptive rhythm throughout the street’s route and creating, through the new skyline, a new scenery, direct descendant of the Gran Vía.
These towers not only integrate new uses the neighbourhood needs, but include part of the apartment buildings upon which they support themselves, leaving them available for larger space facilities.

Our dream of creating a ‘Great Boulevard’ in San Bernardo materialises thanks to a synthesis between nature and urbanism, with vibrant life, flexibility and open to any imaginable use.
A new type of public area that is able to synthesize modern man’s dream of living simultaneously immersed in urban while enjoying the pleasures of urban life.

Would it be possible to contemplate the sky, the horizon and the city from the inside?
…and run and walk at 50 metres above the ground.
This proposal was born out of this nostalgia for the skies in Velazquez and Goya that the city can barely see…we imagine a system of horizontal skyscrapers, that can provide the city with the facilities and uses it needs although lacking the floor on which to build them.
A city with multiple layers that takes advantage of its elevated position to become supports for mechanisms that generate energy, tank-buildings to accumulate water from rain and irrigate the squares in which it’s supported…and to enable the creation of new atmospheres, fabricate clouds or rain, or if the temperature is appropriate, snow.

These new structures are built upon a series of small theme squares, some already existent, reprogrammed, and others to be created and construct a dispersed and un-hierarchical ‘sponging’, providing new poles of activity.
Beyond solving the neighbourhood’s needs, with its lack of services, the proposal explores a new horizon of situations that respond to intangible necessities.
Above all, enable something that Madrid’s development and topography has made impossible: a new relationship between the city and its outside.

We want to provide the city’s hub with the possibility of enjoying the marvellous and always changing sky and cycles of nature; linking locality and territory.
To see the city from a new and surprising point of view, not only it becomes an amazing sight, but we recognize ourselves as part of it.
Above, to run or walk at 50 metres high, to look at the Gran Vía from another perspective, bathing in winter in an indoor swimming pool and see the city at your feet, to have dinner in the 2 de Mayo square enjoying a beautiful sunset, to have breakfast in Fuencarral street watching the sunrise, skating above Comendadoras’ dome, bungee jumping from ‘Luna’ square, got from Hortaleza to San Bernardo without having to see a single car, without having to dodge a single bollard…or anything that we might imagine.

David_...and if the streets of Malasaña always seem too narrow and filled with people, they will become an immense common void where every person in the area might find his place…
And the mass that is built through this operation is transmuted into vertical masses that emerge from the edges of this new space creating a new profile between geological and urban.

The new park is modelled with a new, rich and interwoven orography so that the enormity of common space is perceived as a chain of more intimate rooms, isolated from the noisy city streets. Under the highest hills will be large resource buildings covering the neighbourhood’s needs. The towers will be located in the perimeter, each will establish an interdependent relation with the park’s void depending on their topographical characteristics. Each of them will enrich the city centre with new facilities and elevated public areas.
Instead of a homogeneous density of events, the environment we have created provides us with a new urban view of Madrid’s downtown, a view in which metropolitan public space can unite use, nature and urban intensity, while becoming a point of reference, a great void to expand our perception of urban landscapes, creating a stop, a moment of discontinuity and paradoxically opening possibilities to maximum density.

These three new watchtowers in Madrid’s skyline will enable the city to expand upon itself. The skyline will be more exuberant, adjusting to the city’s more dynamic quality of the last decades. Madrid as a whole will gain public space, altering the balance between public areas in the city centre and provide its inhabitants with the option to enjoy top floor housing in the verge of free space.
To close these three proposals on a concrete environment we should open new perspectives on our historic downtown and the strategies to act upon it.
Beyond a hopeless and conservative critic of our cities’ realities, in particular Madrid, we have to find the needed legitimacy and energy to suggest ambitious and viable alternatives to conquer, for once and for all, the city centre, the hub of the city.

LUDOTEC

(presentation)
…is a socio-physic and chrono-topic research lab, a platform open to analytical discussion, from a recreational and playful standpoint. It doesn’t produce materials or objects but images to be consumed…
Ludotec proposes a work of analytical exploration on modern man’s recreational activities…
Ludotec investigates BOY, produces video-essays with children, ludo-grams for kids, ‘boy’ documents and plays with them without educating…
They have done several projects like “Clearance Sale”, INTERMEDIAE, DOCUMENTA 12 IN KASSEL, AULA DE DANZA in Alcalá de Henares, Grosz festival, Institute of Architects of Madrid… It’s formed by Susana Velasco, Jordi Carmona and Rafael Sánchez Mateo.

LUDOTEC doesn’t provide any intervention, it projects a video for one of its workshops…(!)

…OPEN LETTER FOR MADRID ABIERTO’S ARTISTS, BLACK Madrid, VISIBLE Madrid, IDIOT Madrid, RAT Madrid, POLICE Madrid, PRIVATE Madrid, SOLED OUT Madrid, EMPTY Madrid, CLEAN Madrid, TAMAYO Madrid, MALAYA Madrid, MAYOR Madrid, MALAYA Madrid, MAYOR Madrid, EXTREME Madrid, METRO Madrid, CAPITALIST Madrid, Madrid R… POLICE Madrid, ANTITERRORIST Madrid, POLICE Madrid, DETENTION CENTRE Madrid, CLINICAL HOSPITAL Madrid, PRISON Madrid, NATIONAL DEMOCRACY Madrid, NATIONAL ALLIANCE Madrid, TAMAYAZO Madrid, ESPERANZA AGUIRRE Madrid, TAMAYAZO Madrid, SECRET Madrid, WORK Madrid, TRANSPARENT Madrid, WELL INTENTIONED Madrid, EMPIRE Madrid, 1992 Madrid, PROBLEM Madrid, SUBJET Madrid, MADRILIANS Madrid, VICTIMS Madrid, FASCIST Madrid, CULTURAL Madrid, FLORENTINO Madrid, MONCLOA Madrid, ROTTEN Madrid, WITHOUT POSITION Madrid, HARMLESS Madrid, ARTIST Madrid, CIVIC Madrid, HARMLESS Madrid, ASTIST Madrid, CORNER OF JARAMA Madrid …ROYAL MADRID

…OPEN LETTER FROM MADRID TO THE ARTISTS OF MADRID ABIERTO, BLACK Madrid, OFFENSIVE Madrid, POSITION Madrid, ENJOYMENT Madrid, BLOW Madrid, UNDERMINE Madrid, JACOTOCK Madrid, EQUAL Madrid, COMBAT Madrid, DEFECTOR Madrid, CARLOS PALOMINO Madrid, BODY Madrid, TACTIC Madrid, TIERNO Madrid, DINIO Madrid, ARENAS Madrid, FOREIGNER Madrid, CALATRAVA Madrid, MALASAÑA Madrid, MEDIA Madrid, DIAMOND DUST Madrid, OPAQUE Madrid, EXTRAUNVINGER FOUNDATION!!!!!!!!! Madrid, ANYONE Madrid, VALLECAS Madrid, GESTURE Madrid, BALLESTA Madrid, SPIRITUALIST Madrid, POWER Madrid, ENRIQUE DE CASTRO Madrid, FATHER IN LAW Madrid, LONG LIVE Madrid, DE LA ROSA Madrid, SQUATTER Madrid, NIGHT Madrid, CLEARANCE SALE Madrid, BROKEN Madrid, KNIFE Madrid, ANTISOCIAL Madrid, LA HOSTIA FAENAT Madrid, FREE Madrid, NO ONE Madrid, WE ARE ALL STILL HERE Madrid, COMBINED Madrid, BASTARD Madrid, AUTONOMOUS Madrid, CARABANCHEL Madrid, ARMED Madrid, ARTIST Madrid, ARMED Madrid, ARTIST Madrid, ARMED Madrid, ARTIST Madrid, STRIKE Madrid, LAME Madrid, I LOVE Madrid …

…OPEN LETTER TO MADRID ABIERTO’S PARTICIPANTS

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