Manuel Monteserín
Architecture / Urban Strategy / 3d ART
La Marina Urban Plan
Location
San Sebastián de los Reyes , Madrid. Spain
Year
2008
Status
Competition
Typology
Town planning
Themes
Architecture, urbanism, sustainability, hypothesis , 3d city, compact city, unsaturated city, permeable city
This contest proposed the creation of an urban center in the area of La Marina, San Sebastián de lo Reyes, Madrid.
To do this, we constituted a curious and heterogeneous group of architects made up of Enrique Bardají, Asensio Pamaral (both architects with great experience in urban projects), Maria Mallo, Ana Peñalba and Manuel Monteserín (Young people with many utopian ideas in their minds and little experience).
The approach was as follows, what if the young part of the team raises a series of hypotheses for a city of the future and together with the experience of Enrique and Arsenio we find the necessary urban tools to make it come true?
HYPOTHESIS FOR A NEW CITY
COMPACT CITY.
Hip 1: A city where the car is unnecessary, where your life unfolds in a space that can be reached on foot or by bike, where the time that you used to consume in traffic jams is now spent on walking, where your neighbors are your co-workers and where your workplace is free of hierarchies since your boss is on the other side of the Adsl.
"The WORK-LIFE approach allows energy savings for the city."
“…. Compactness, therefore, facilitates contact, exchange and communication that
they are, as is known, the essence of the city. Enhances the probability of contacts and
with them enhances the relationship between the elements of the urban system. ”Salvador Rueda (biologist and psychologist)
We believe in the compact city compared to the diffuse city, because the former means greater energy savings , and a better quality of life. This model makes it possible to establish a city of overlapping uses where urban relations that do not depend on the car and that form more consolidated neighborhoods can be established.
It will be about designing green areas of proximity and local commerce that do not depend on the vehicle and that activate the streets.
PERMEABLE CITY
Hip2: A city that is not planned from fear, but creates a solid neighborhood relationship that makes it safe. A city 24 hours and 7 days a week, a city with open doors, accessible rooftops, vertical routes, streets that can also be walked vertically
New York City left the basement of its skyscrapers and some of its rooftops permeable, so that after office hours the city continues to be used. The opposite happens in Azca, a waterproof fabric, where one walks among inaccessible giants.
La Moraleja, and similar urbanizations, do not configure a permeable public space either, since life in these fabrics occurs IN DOOR, in this way neighborhood relationships are not established that consolidate a public space.
The city must be a permeable, accessible and usable fabric.
If there is no security there is no street, if there is no street there is no city .
CITY OF RE_EVOLUCIÓN
Hip3: The open field changed its degree of humidity and became a landscape of crops that generated an activity for retirees and children, who every day brought fresh vegetables home. That developed a generational exchange program that led to the construction of a building that made new relationships and intergenerational activities possible ...
We should not propose the starting point of any fabric. We should not do a clean slate and start from 0. The rationalist lines impose an external order and alien to the natural, sensible and specific order of the place.
It is preferable to understand the place, listen to it, measure its fertile points, evaluate them and, on this, enable their development.
The new grafts must seek the connection with the existing tissue, attending to the demands that it has, and not only seeking the continuity of the lines.
This gives rise to the generation of a cartography that analyzes the urban fertility points, the study of the topological history of the place, the traces that history has left in it, etc.
CITY 3D
Hip4: We walk through the narrow streets, we arrive at a square, where two commercial towers are born on the roofs that announce the latest Tarantino film, we change elevation, we move along walkways full of people eating waffles and ice creams, from there the city shows another landscape….
The traditional planning has made its decisions on the ground level, in this level it has drawn the lines and these have been extruded to give rise to the urban morphology.
Couldn't we think and develop the city in 3 dimensions? Why not make connections and enrich the city in your section ? Why not establish sustainability strategies in response to this new three-dimensional condition, establishing different levels of action ? Why not design a public space in height ? Should public buildings continue to be representative free-standing pieces or can they begin to hybridize, generating more integrated types?
UNSATURATED CITY
Hip4: This is a city in permanent change, structures that were ephemeral have been consolidated within urban life, the increase in density is transforming the sky line, and new developments appear on the rooftops, the small gardens have now become at the entrances to the new air parks that fly over the city like green filaments ...
Lately the cities are raised shaping their latest chapter. The parameters that configure the final moment of its being are established and the city is born dead.
What if the parameters that construct the proposals did not define a final state , but rather a possible situation for its development? What if the regulations were not governed by absolute values but values relative to each stage of growth? What if the city was designed to never be saturated, and have room for maneuver ?
Credits
Architects
Leon11:
Manuel Alvarez-Monteserin
Ana Peñalbla
Maria Mallo Zurdo
Enrique bardají
Arsenio Pamaral
Images
3D Manu-Facturas