PLAZAESPANA- VERDE COMUN
Client: Madrid City Council
Place: Madrid, Spain
Competition: 2016
Type: Transport/Leisure
Area: 50.753 m2
The restructuring of Plaza de España is a great opportunity to create a big urban park in the city centre that will act as a green lung of Madrid. Our proposal wants to create a continuous 100Ha green park that links Debod Park, Sabatini gardens and Palace gardens.
The project aims to reflect on the meaning of public parks inside the city in a moment in time when more than a half of the world population lives in an urban setting. In this context, we believe that parks can have a different role than in the cities of the XIX century. We believe that we have learned from this century experiences of using and living them.
The new role of the park in the city is to be a complex natural island. This island is changing and alive with all its qualities intensely exposed in an urban environment also dense, intense and wealthy cultivated. The park cannot be anything else than a Park of Events for an exuberant nature. The city itself must not lose the wealth of natural systems and can demand to hold them inside. This is the kind of park proposed, a park of green events, where the vegetation is managed and laid in an artificial and intelligent way, and where its more interesting, sensual and expressive qualities are exploited in order to generate a unique space that changes over time.
The park, a complex and wealthy ecosystem, is formalized as an expression of Madrid’s own potential: the Park as an Urban Culture Institution. The way to materialize this new idea of park includes the necessity of reinvention of the figure that defines it. To explain the park we do not only need project documents but also a timing management plan, with a communication strategy and cultural and educational purposes that may lead to understand it as a museum space.
AZPML
Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Maider Llaguno, Amaya Luzarraga, Ivaylo Nachev, Diego Grisalena, Blanca Munoz, Irene Abellan, Federica Campeotto.
Consultants:
Engineering: ARUP
Renders: SBDA
