Ju(MP) in the water _ KISS THAT FROG | E13 Winner
Europan 13 - Sankt Pölten
The project wants to redefine an important node of the city, head of a linear system strongly defined by natural and artificial components. This infrastructure, define different boards, which activate each other growth processes. The system, defines the urban edge against the railway, sewing up connections, services and public spaces, branching out towards the soft green river edge, structured by a system of canals and basins and by minimum units for the management of the Park, which becomes the glue element of public space defining a new system of ecological connections into an urban and territorial scale.
The phases do not want to be a rigid preset land occupation system, but a flexible way to interpret the needs of future generations (i.e. railway implementation), making the settlement models editable and adaptable with new models, which are thought to be more appropriate in a certain moment, ensuring anyhow the water structure and the park system continuity.
The goal is then to answer the question of the new urban settlement through the “added value” which embraces a strong natural component, overturning the exclusive antithesis between urban and natural contexts through an inclusive proposal which is adaptable, contemporary and processual. Thanks to exceptions and variations of the rule, the habitat will be fed by future events and will be able to absorb the changes and the variations of perspective of this place, shaping itself according to new needs which are today unknown.
The awakening becomes opportunity to redefine an important node of the city, head of a linear system strongly defined by natural and artificial components. This infrastructure, define different boards, which activate each other growth processes. The system, defines the urban edge against the railway, sewing up connections, services and public spaces, branching out towards the soft green river edge, structured by a system of canals and basins and by minimum
units for the management of the Park, which becomes the glue element of public space defining a new system of ecological connections into an urban and territorial scale. The Park is inhabited through a mechanism of forest ownership, redefining a network of paths that infiltrate, reconnecting the city street with the path on the riverbank.
The growth dynamics of the project are based on the recognition of permanent signs, which will be the bridge between the phases, and glue between generations that will live the habitat. These permanent signs are those that regulate the forest-park spaces (paths, tool huts, squares) and the wet system (canals and basins) that from the river infiltrates into the forest. The structure of paths and canals, although it may seem apparently weak, it’s a strong structural
element which impedes to attack the woods in phase one and integrates it with
minimum and sustainable systems with respect to the habitat. This choice allows us not to need, from stage one, for an urban infrastructure designed to accommodate the maximum number of living units planned for phase 3-5, and it also allows that the infrastructure grid to grow together with the phases in a jointed resilient process.
The new tesseras are added completing the ones that were left incomplete according to the previous phase or are positioned where there are light colonization units inside the park, such as the squares or basin areas.
The tessera will protrude towards the woods with punctual and structured elements, waiting for the next one to be built, in a process that leads to the canal. The connection between one phase and the other will then be the welding with the previous incomplete block and laying of the bases for the one to come.
According to this process, the project constants will always be kept: urban spaces and natural areas, the integrity of the park and the structural use of water. The phases do not want to be a rigid preset land occupation system, but a flexible way to interpret the needs of future generations (i.e. railway implementation), making the settlement models editable and adaptable
with new models, which are thought to be more appropriate in a certain moment, ensuring anyhow the water structure and the park system continuity.
The historic fabric of the town of Sankt Polten is defined by compact blocks which are very close, where the buildings, facing the street, define a proper public space. Through this mechanism the town manages to self-define itself, proposing a spatial coherent urban image bearer of place identity. Because of their nature, the spaces of the city evolve as collective spaces which are dense of potential activities, and they offer them selves as places able to host a community. When the compact urban tessera gets further away from the urban centre, it opens to the outside of the city, toward the field, embodying a large scale mediator between urban and rural contexts. The rurality enters the city and fills the hearts of the blocks in the form of private gardens or vegetables gardens and defining the living unit as the element in which it is manifested the strong spatial tension between urban areas and rural areas, between stone and grass, between wall and tree.
Therefore, the habitat system of the project withdraws from the relation forms of the “large fabric model” of the latest urban developments, in order to reaffirm a dense aggregation system which faces the road, in terms of urban space, uses, human dynamics, which finds its rooting in the autochthonous history. The need to reappropriate the road front is related to the desire to think the man-scale public spaces, which live inside an almost domestic nature, as indispensable and able to regenerate a sharing spirit that should not be affected by uses. As well as urban areas weld the road fronts, the green spaces connect and stitch the back of the living units in a systemic logic of woodland park which links the built compact blocks to small paths.
The green system is intended as a public usable space, complementary to the urban area, which wants to project the inhabitants towards the rediscovery of community values relevant to nature and enjoying places in the open air. The goal is then to answer the question of the new urban settlement through the “added value” which embraces a strong natural component, overturning the exclusive antithesis between urban and natural contexts through an inclusive proposal which is adaptable, contemporary and processual. Thanks to exceptions and variations of the rule, the habitat will be fed by future events and will be able to absorb the changes and the variations of perspective of this place, shaping itself according to new needs which are today unknown.
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