0514[c] Campus de Justicia. Madrid (Spain)

International competition
Honorific Mention

In 2005 we created a three-office team to respond to the call of a former partner to participate in a series of local competitions for Court Houses in Andalucía. At the time the Madrid Campus organized a 2 phase competition to develop the Master Plan on 20Ha of land next to the new airport Terminal 4, that will hold a total of a 300.000 m2 of justice facilities.

The other offices were RoomZ, directed by Alfredo Peñafiel and Katrine Baumgarten with whom, at the time, OPR shared space and infrastructure and had been collaborating sporadicly, and Mara Bravo, who had been involved in justice buildings for some time in Seville and had gained specif knowledge about the particularities of the new functional structure of justice administration envisioned by the government.

So we decided to go big and enter the competition against 200 mayor international offices representing 26 different countries. We submitted a bold plan with a clear central garden strip (700 m. long) that organized the campus around a colored-mirror filter from which the different buildings would service. This mechanism allowed for a very secured campus (The train bombing in Madrid was recent and it was an obvious requirement in the brief), but also it permitted a very flexible phasing scheme for the construction preserving the integrity of the main representational space (taking in consideration almost 20 different departments must be transfer in a 15 year time frame).

We were concerned with the strategy for the common central space being aware that the future buildings would be designed by different offices and we expected that, although each one of them would be competing for attention, they would fold respectfully to such a monumental garden.

Unexpectedly we made the cut with other 5 proposals and went into a second phase to respond to the specific concerns the jury had raised about our project. They where almost exclusively related to the definition of the public space and the need to provide for climate moderation solution (Madrid can be extreme both in summer and in winter).

Joao Nunes of PROAP, with whom I had collaborated during my SOM last project in Lisbon joined the team and greatly impacted the design. He made us realize that we were dealing with a territorial dimension and that it was required to controlled its relation with the human scale (but unfortunately I think we were incapable of transmitting this simple idea to the jury).

We worked for another three months in the design of the garden, by the first week of the new phase we had come out already with the concept of a double layer that would unfold to become both the ground and the sky of the new space, providing for a program definition of certain areas, vegetation treatment, shadow filters and circulation mechanisms.

At one point the layer took the shape of a voronoi structure, although at the time we were completely clueless about the actual mathematical concept, which we abuse in later projects. As the project became more and more complex, and centered in this new element we asked Jesús Jimenez of NB35 to join us and his input allowed for the final feasible solution for the project.

The competition was awarded to the team led by Frechilla & López-Peláez, who presented a very simple and effective concept of cylinder buildings on a green carpet. I think as a Master Plan it was probably the most pragmatical solution of all, but I have doubts that the interstitial space would ever be more than marginal.

Of the rest of the proposals, the one presented by Eduardo Pesquera y Jesús Ulargui was particulary clever and beautiful.

Carlos Infanfes
July 08