A warehouse of the 58, belonging to an old gravel quarry industry, is recovered to reactivate and transform it into a winery, through the disposal of industrial elements.

The construction elements must keep in scale economy and mass production, to minimize its impact on the environment and consequently to the economy, as well as they are organized under spatial, functional and higrothermal design criteria.

The project is structured regarding the following points: a four-meter-high closet that organizes the service spaces, the action centre where human activity is assisted by machines and the zona 900, a welcome lounge with a striped carpet and a bright ceiling, underneath which the cellar is located, and where the control unit monitorizes the vineyard in real-time, while the design and pedagogy of the wine takes place.

In conclusion, this low cost criteria force us to claim: less (money) is more!

Authors: Carles Sala i Relja Ferusic

Name of project: Celler Lagravera, Alfarràs, Lleida.

Consultants: Josep Maria Estivill, Quality Surveyor, Carops, Oenology, Ventura, Mechanical

Budget: 180.000 €

Area: 600 m2

Photography: Sala Ferusic Arquitectes

EDITORIAL
P01 Parainfrastructures

AGENDA
P03 Review, Quaderns Sessions: OFFICE KGDVS — Moritz Küng

1 ESSAY X 4 CASES

P06 Infrastructuralism: The Pathology of Negative Externalities. John May
P10 Heathrow Airplot: Weightless. Paisajes Emergentes
P14 Brockholes Wetland Visitor Centre. Adam Khan
P18 Lolita. Langarita-Navarro arquitectos
P22 Nagelhaus. Caruso St John Architects

ARCHIVE
Quaderns #83 (Open spaces in Barcelona), 1971
“Albergue para congresistas, ICSID, Fernando Bendito, Carlos Ferrater, José Prada, arquitectos” (Instant City), pp. 85-88

P30 Interview: José Miguel De Prada Poole
P33 Inflated Ambition. Simon Sadler
P37 The Counter-Instant Instant. Carlos Ferrater
P39 Instant City, Global Village. Felicity D. Scott

3 ESSAYS X 1 CASE
P46 Infrastructure and Time: Apropos Anticipation and Adaptation. Javier García-Germán
P49 Solutions d’urgence. Roger Sauquet
P52 Air Control. Enrique Ramirez

Girona-Costa Brava Airport, photos by Coke Bartrina

GUEST
P57 Infrastructure Preservation. David Gissen #263

OBSERVATORY

*Image: Paisajes Emergentes, Weightless. Heathrow Airplot

The image of ACESA toll stations is widely incorporated into the collective imaginary, unlike other highways in other regions. In the present context, the possession of a brand image is a fact and a critical value.

The project enhances this dual nature, emphasizing all that is technical, as well as all that is natural, preserving a harmonious relationship between them.

The highway actives itself as a communicator of information and guidance for the recognition of a particular landscape, and contributes to the definition of the character and tone of the ACESA highways: Cabin high signals, horizontal and lower plans: pavement colors (teletags -car and truck type-)…

Adress: Autopista AP-7 La Jonquera-Salou

Consultants: Structural engineering: Martí Cabestany, Mechanical, PDI engineering, Quality surveyor: AT3, slp

Collaborators: M.Cabo, A. Rizescu, M. Rebocho, F. Romaní, M. García

Area: 57.790 m2

Presupuesto: 6.089.490,00€

Fotografía: Adrià Goula

As I leaned against the concrete balcony I became aware that an immense silence hung over the landscape around me. By a rare freak of flight control no aircraft were landing or taking off from the airport runways […] Looking closely at this silent terrain, I realized that the entire zone which defined the landscape of my life was now bounded by a continuous artificial horizon, formed by the raised parapets and embankments of the motorways and their access roads and interchanges. These encircled the vehicles below like the walls of a crater several miles in diameter. The silence continued.*

J.G. Ballard, Crash

Any infrastructure, as an element belonging to the social configuration of territory, is part of an invisible field, a realm beyond its immediate, tangible, physical context. Ports, terminals, and networks are vital supports for our economies. Yet the increasing speed and the breadth of change of our habits and forms of consumption has revealed the fragility of the links between the immaterial, shifting nature of infrastructures and their physical support, as well as the urgency of reflecting on the consequences that can be attributed to the different tempos of architecture and market fluctuations, the disjuncture between material and fleetingness.

Throughout the better part of the past century, architecture and urbanism continued to perpetuate the heroic representation of infrastructure. The cover of Space, Time & Architecture** features a highway roundabout instead of a building, and the Vegas strip was an emblem of the postmodern paradigm. This infrastructural conception was called into question in the 1960s and 1970s, as experimental practices reclaimed, not without a certain naïveté, the possibility of an instant architecture that would be capable of revealing the dysfunctional rifts between the useful life of infrastructures, their production, and their consumption.

We believe it is time to rethink an infrastructural model at risk of quickly becoming obsolete. This should be, particularly in our days, a vital task for architects: vindicating and domesticating a framework for action they have habitually been sidelined from.

Aware of our scarce resources, it is time to re-program the rigid models of the past, from the margins, designing flexible infrastructures free from rhetoric.

* J.G. Ballard, Crash, London, Vintage, 1995.
** Sigfried Gideon, Space, Time and Architecture, the Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge, Harvard University, 1941.

Photo: Coke Bartrina (Girona-Costa Brava Airport)

This site is currently taken up by a controlled waste landfill site nearing its capacity limit. This fact has caused its managing body to consider regulating the closure of the facility and to study possible future uses for the area. The choice of the location of the CTRV has also taken into account different criteria of logistical and economic suitability, as well as the minimization of the environmental impact resulting from the installation and operation of waste management-related activities.

The activity of the landfill site has led to unfriendly topographical alterations and modifications in the natural environment. For this reason, we decided to establish the facilities in those areas where the activity of the landfill had already damaged the natural environment. Despite the size of the plant facilities, it is intended to achieve the highest landscape integration with the environment. In order to achieve this goal, we pursue a high topographical adaptation, where the impact from roofs and facades is minimized by the subsequent landscape restoration.

The project involves the construction of two large treatment areas under a large roof. These areas, separated by a driveway, are different in height and they sit at different levels. That is the reason why the roof changes its geometry according to the programs and dimensions of each precinct.

The roof will cover a variety of requirements: forced air vents, skylights, etc., and they will blend together by the use of a graphic structure that may be transformed into a landscape roof.

The different circles contain earth, gravel, and native groundcovers and shrubs. Over time, they will balance the impact of the facility without resorting to camouflage or mimicry.

Consultants: IDEMA, engineering

Collaborators: Xavier Ramoneda, architect, Mario Suñer, architect

Area: 45.000m2

Budget: 74.000.000€

Photography: Francisco Urrutia

Hybrid architecture, pushed by the fact that it concentrates in a single architectural intervention a triple object-, landscape- and infrastructure-related nature, generates architectural answers with very specific features, which widen the conceptual framework of topics that are transversal and consubstantial to architecture.

All architectural intervention is defined as hybrid that is at once object, landscape and infrastructure, an architectural intervention that simultaneously meets three conditions:

_It is a physical intervention that, as a result of a project, proposes an architectural space generated on the basis of human intervention.

_It is an architectural intervention, which is at the same time a landscape: the architectural intervention integrates inseparably into the landscape.

_It is at once an architectural intervention and an infrastructure: in transforming into a section of infrastructure itself, the architectural intervention incorporates part of its laws.

The fact that the architectural object incorporates the infrastructural nature into its own implies the precondition that this object becomes an integral part of an infrastructural system of higher order.

At the same time that it possesses the autonomy characteristic of all architectural objects, a hybrid is also a section of infrastructure integrated in a wider infrastructural system —conceived to absorb flows of circulation— with its own laws and functioning.

The mobility becomes a core quality of the architectural intervention with significant consequences concerning the spatial configuration:

_As far as the programmatic dimension is concerned, spaces of circulation integrate into the realm of the primary spaces as part of the core programme and occupy a greater proportion of the surface relative to the entire available surface.

_As far as the order system is concerned, the fact that the hybrid object belongs to an infrastructural system of a superior order will result in the necessary incorporation of part of the laws defining this infrastructural system as an ordering system into the genesis of the hybrid.

_As far as the condition of limit is concerned, the indispensable condition of physical continuity between the physical area defining the project and the infrastructural system to which it belongs, leads to the disappearance of the concept of limit associated with that of border in light of the emergence of its definition as space of transition.

Consultants: Lluís Cañizares - quantity surveyor Juanma Salvadó - quantity surveyor Marc de Jaime –  mechanical Bernúz-Fernández - structure

Collaborators: Oriol Ribes architect Elena Molina  architect Francisco Mouzo  architect

Area: 673,48 m2

Budget: 801.310,43€

Photography: Marcela Grassi

The ruin, as concept, has undoubtedly a melancholy touch, but not of a bygone representative order; rather one of the future, of a “déjà-vu” future that is already present but that we do not yet know who to deal with. The ruin: el arte en la era de su congelación, Jorge Luis Marzo. 1991

Modern ruins, a profitable topography

“Modern ruins, a profitable topography” it is a photographic inventory of abandoned speculative construction in Spain. It depicts a selection of landscapes within the national territory that are occupied by uncompleted building developments. The massive implementation of leisure resorts and residential complexes in the recent decade has transformed vast costal regions of Spain and spread far into its interior provinces. The premature decay of these settlements caused by the bursting of the real estate bubble has generated images of disturbing beauty that bare witness to the incongruity between the short lived real estate sham – aborted for technical reasons – and their lasting physical after-effects.

The Spanish real estate boom and its disastrous outcome engendered the proliferation of a new type of landscape, which one could call profitscape. Peculiarities of topography, climate conditions and local circumstances have had little relevance in the genesis of these contemporary landscapes. The marketing strategy of real estate development was focused on visual consumption; its product– not unlike television– was created by extraction, reduction and mixture. The result is a type of global resort-landscape without any local contextual reference. Its prime advantage is its exceedingly “a-territorial” character which facilitates reproduction and cloning in order to be  sold anywhere and anyhow. When abandoned without being completed, these non-places gain a certain distinctive touch, part of its peculiar extravagance due to contrast between the fictitious character and built reality.

There are many kinds of ruins and their significance is manifold. A building in decay combined with prosperous vegetation rarely leaves anyone impassive. Its incompleteness is highly suggestive and can be read as a physical timeline, a tragic element, a melancholic monument or a romantic symbiosis between nature and man. The unfinished buildings that colonize the profitscapes in question are certainly a type of their own. These constructions, some barely begun, were never finished and therefore never fulfilled their purpose of shelter. Does their lack of history – nobody ever lived in it and nothing ever happened within its walls – render this type of ruin obsolete, without any chance of transformation, or can it end up acquiring some significance or value?

Date: ongoing project, 2010-2011

Author and photographer: Julia Schulz-Dornburg

Collaborators: travels Javier Ventosa, investigation Eugenia Troncoso

We work two scales simultaneously, a bigger one, related with territorial aspects, and a nearest other related to other particular implicit situations which happens on every corner of the village.

Continuous evolution arises the project directly from a series of diagram (made in the whole core of the old village of Oliana) which analyzes at different scales a set of parameters who defines the whole place (geographical accidents, environment topography, relation between circulation and different open space uses, paths of water…) We intended, through this diagram, to visualize and discover not-necessarily-physical aspects to put in evidence the old Oliana’s public spaces mesh and evolve it through the project itself.

Construction work is a material translation of all this previously made analysis.

Topography

Modification topography works are used as a tool to define the project.

Easy off slopes to remove obstacles is our target to reach a better relation between open spaces.

Greatest slopes become granite pieces working as steps in walkways.

Circulations

From negative car circulations tangential space bags are detected to be used as living areas. Since the identification of this bags a microespacial configuration system is proposed for public space.

Water

Water paths are assimilated to riverbeds and torrents in Oliana.

Segre’s rolling stones are used as water channels in the streets drawing its travels in the pavement.

Visual

Multiple visual relations are established from the old village to the mountains surrounding due its topography.

A choice of visual points has been made and throughout its the surrounding landscape is incorporated to the place. Tier-banks are located as viewpoints.

Recovered materials

All possible preexisting materials are reused wherever they are found: all former steps of the Mare de Déu dels Àngels square’s staircase are reused as pavement. Old separation field-to-street wall stones are recessed in the new concrete pavement, the sub-base sand comes from the old street concrete conveniently crushed.

Adress: Mare de Déu dels Àngels, Mossèn Albert Vives i del Cementiri squares, Oliana.

Architects: Joaquín Pérez Sánchez, Eva Girona Cabré

Collaborators: Quantity surveyor: Mercè Martín Valls

Area : Mare de Déu dels Àngels sq. 348 m2, Mossen Albert Vives sq. 648 m2, Cementery sq. 628 m2. Total intervention area: 1.624 m2

Budget: 237.818,03 €

Photography: Joaquín Pérez Sánchez

1.-By adapting business licence to this kind of commerce, avoiding rotation and floating storage.

2.-By including logistic microplatforms, as a possibility, for single centralized delivery. The conclusion says that “correction of some urban management factors might correct traditional city street trend to loose vitality and trade diversity.

Project intention document: doc_ENG

Architect: Sophie Demingeux

Collaborators:Fabio Bagnara, Thomas Wissing

Consultants: Juan Pérez Fernández, engineer.

Area: 2925 m2

Budget: 701.410,00 €

Photography: Project Team