aMR
Thesis|Interpretation and Research Center|Interfaz|Malaga
The intervention area is located at the end of the promenade “Antonio Banderas” in Malaga. It meets the Mediterrean sea and allows to connect the historic centre with the urban fabric that spreads towards the east side. Therefore it is a strategic situation organizing itself like a transition space between two very different environments representing the limit of the litoral connection and the meeting with a natural space such as the mouth of the Guadalorce river. That is a territory still to be transformed. Its border walls delimit the plot where previously there was “The Repsol butan gas bottling plant”. The area is located in a context, once an industrial network and nowadays a neglected one, which show us the impossibility for the town to absorbe this kind of activity within the urban network and therefore the clear opportunity to reinterpret its configuration.
After the study of the urban metabolism (the exchanges which are carried out in the territory) and the configuration of the field of action, the proyect strategy is based on a new industry, “the cultural industry”. This approach will allow the connection of the new processes (touristic, landscape and investigative ones), that we can find in the territory at present, providing a new opportunity in order to reintrepret the production dynamics developed in this scenery: the territory farming, exploitation and naturalization.
The urban intervention organizes the scenery through a network of connective routes which allow to reconfigure, collect and distribute the different flows that come to the field of action. In this way a limit space is turned into a new space of transition, where the interconnection of present displacements will permit the link with a new generation of processes being part of their same evolution.
After the element examination of the place and the reinterpetation of the traces of the old and bottling floor, the public area organizes itself like a scenery that recovers the productive processes of this territory. It is made up of three strata: the first one, “urban”, comes from the town and connects the tissue allowing fields of transit and activity; the second one,”natural”, provides a new economic engine for the area (urban farming) and recovers the productive activity of Guadalorce valley (sugar cane, citrus and fruit tree); the third one is an element which supports the other two strata organizing itself as a system of artificial wetlands and an ensamble of lagoons with aquatic farmings where the vegetal investigation will be developed in order to close the natural cicle since the recycle and depuration of water.
The investigation center is imagined as a process catalyst. It rises up from the principal node (meeting space) in order to collect and distribute the flows so that it could configure an exchange space and a communication at different levels-interfaces. It is made up as a linear element that connects in a direct way the transition town-promenade-field of action, adapting to the traces of the place, measuring the area and appropriating the existing. A landscape infrastructure recovers the spaces to generate new processes, adjusting to its unstable land and it turns into a connective element or node between nature and artifice.
© 2015 by ANGELES MONTERO ARCHITECT.