Manuel Monteserín

FROM PLAIN YELLOW TO HYPERLANDSCAPE®

 

INSTRUCTIONS TO UNDERSTAND THE HYPERLANDSCAPE®.

1. There are many complex things whose order is an order that we do not know.

2. The Universe is full of things whose beauty we admire, while at the same time we do not understand.

3. Not everything has an easy explanation.

 

CHANGED: 80,000 m2 of arid and gray platform (partially yellow) uninhabitable.

POR: Set of places of all colors, for all citizens.

 

A STRATEGY BEFORE A PROJECT.

How to get from a built front (not unitary, fragmented, without common guidelines, with interspersed voids through which the historic center of Algeciras escapes) to the sheet of water from the Sea:

1. In three successive actions or phases:

City phase / zone, consisting of a pedestrian promenade (with public transport stops), semi-underground parking and a shaded and landscaped roof.

Sea phase / zone, composed of berths for fishermen's boats, yachts, canoeing, fish market and restaurants and bars, with light tree-like structures and viewpoints-cafeteria with lifts, topped by freshwater pools.

Middle phase / area, with outdoor solarium-spa, school and dog area, garden area with native species on the seafront, free access sports areas, picnic and music area, adjacent to the multipurpose building, and children's area composed of play buildings and areas of driver education.

The cycling routes and the running routes on foot traverse and block the entire performance.

1. With interventions whose financing is guaranteed, so that the cost of the action is NEVER passed on to citizens. All activities and buildings are awarded under a concession regime, with preference for local SMEs, with the Administration involved supporting the construction costs. The concession contracts will include clauses that allow the modification of activities, in the event that those initially planned are not fully viable.

2. Avoiding understanding the term "integrate" as the simple action of prolonging streets (which are lost meandering in the urban fabric from which they come), and not making alignments of palm trees, and designer street lamps, massive occupations with meandering and bi-colored terrazzo floors (all that we understand as a Promenade ...).

3. With a tapestry of activities, interchangeable in its program and flexible in its management, and not with a simple conventional constructive action.

 

 

URBANIZING is not putting asphalt, bins and streetlights in the middle of the non-city. TO URBANIZE IS TO MAKE URBAN, TO MAKE A CITIZEN , which was first the sea, then the outer port and now it is an inland port… and a car dump.

 

How many people are needed to fill the Yellow Plain? All the registered inhabitants of Algeciras (109,600) fit into the scope of the action (at the rate of one person per square meter, if the treated area of Avenida de la Virgen del Carmen is added). We cannot summon them and get them to always be there. In the MULTICOLORED LANDSCAPE the activities implemented will maintain occupation, regardless of the number of people who occupy it at each hour of the day.

 

The Yellow Plain had no horizon. Enclosed by the new container terminal and Juan Carlos I dock, by the parking lot of the Maritime Station, by the buildings on Avenida de la Virgen del Carmen, by the North Access viaduct, there is only, as a backdrop, the middle distance from Gibraltar and the long distance from the Penibetic mountains. The MULTICOLORED LANDSCAPE elevates us in many places, to find NEW HORIZONS: Our coast, beyond La Línea, Africa, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic ... From the viewpoints, from the roof of the new buildings, from the raised gardens ...

 

The public space of the 21st century should be like this. A place to discover every day, in every visit. Designed from the acoustic comfort (attenuator of the high acoustic level generated by the rebound of the sound of the traffic on the built front), tactile, olfactory and visual, and also from a strict protection from the intense solar radiation and the prevailing winds of Poniente and I raised.