0516[c] Manzanares River Park. Madrid (Spain)

International competition

While we were working on the second phase of the Justice Campus in Madrid, Nuno Guerreiro and I decided to explore a parametrical approach to landscape. We asked Joao Nunes and his team to join us for a very ambitious competition the city of Madrid was launching to create the great linear park of the Manzanares river, which would organize 3km strip of land that had been previously part of the first ring road. The highways where going to be buried and the river revitalized, bringing together both sides of the margins.

There were, therefore, many issues to be solved: the river itself (now a very wide bed and little water), the bridges, the new borders, the topography resulting from the buried infrastructure, etc…

To us, the most difficult challenge was to transform the overall idea of the citizens of Madrid about that place, to make them understand that their city actually had a river, a river with water instead of a current of cars as they could remember. We wanted to make sure Madrid could look at itself on the river as London or Paris do on the Thames or the Seine, but we didn’t want to completely forget the fact that the ring road was still there, and more important, that for many decades it had been an essential part of the shaping of the city as we know it today.

It was not a nostalgic approach. We just did not want to give up such a powerful scene as we walked into the new. There was something about the project that had to do with the futuristic movies; it seemed necessary to leave traces of things that are familiar to us in order to make it credible. The transformation was too radical and we thought it would help if the new park would have a genetic heritage from the ring road.

There were two parallels lines of work during the design process. one of them came out of a very thorough analysis of the context served by the new park and specifically of the services and public facilities along the riverbed. A series of numbers where crunched on the main axis to visualize variation of density and deficit areas. The resulting figure was very much like a snake on which we mapped a geometrical pattern. The idea of this pattern was to translate into a design grid both the contextual analysis and the physical constrain in each area of the park, while maintaining an overall morphological strategy.

The other line of work was about establishing a fertile connection between the underground highways and the surface park. We had been playing with mirrors since the days of the Kakolamaki project, and especificly the idea of periscope fascinated us. The idea was clear and simple: to light the tunnels during the day with images of the city above and to iluminate the park at night with the lights of the cars below.

We loved that solution and certainly we are hopping to bring it back to life soon. Imagine the view of the park at night, from the top of the city, with lights moving from one tree to another following the traffic patterns, yellow in one side, red in the other. As a citizen of Madrid you must wonder what kind of alchemy had made water turn into cars and cars into a lighting forest.