"Parque de Valdebebas"

The competition had as main goal the planning and design of a new Urban Park of approximately 80 hectares in the north area of Madrid. The proposal should solve the connections and transition between the new city and the big Forest Park, generate endowments and commensurate uses with the scale of the Park, and generally take advantage of its great landscaping, urban, environmental and social potential.
During the competition the motto "sun and shade" was used, which, according to the submitted proposal, represents one of the fundamental themes of the park, a theme that speaks to us of the contrasts of the place, and that the park interprets through the complicity established between large clear areas and forest areas; between the densely covered slopes and the relief of the peakline through the water surfaces and their vibrations through the plasticity of inert structures of the park, white and smooth solid walls that constitute dams that limit pavements, containing land, hosting features like inhabited walls – house walls. White walls where shadows are drawn and also graffiti, signs, messages, removed year after year and transformed into fruits of the Park, to give place to the white one again.
The proposal is based on the definition of a strategy that leads to a design and this strategy defines a flexible, evolving and sustainable project implementation. The intention is not to capture an image on the ground but to understand the characteristics of the place, understand the energies that determine it’s functioning, placing the desire to transform these same energies flow. The research is in fact the design of a dynamic, of an operation from where the image, or more precisely an infinite succession of images, emerges. The proposal establishes the possibility of a staged implementation in the construction - installation of the Park. This staging of the implementation is the result of a series of projective essential factors: the need for soil improvement, the need for an effective reforestation and the need to strictly manage the available water.
The following constituent elements can be distinguished: Programs and experiences of the Park.
The peripheral “edge', provides a space for mediation between the urbanized area and the Park, offering a wide range of uses opportunities throughout the year.
The lakes system is a fundamental element for the landscaping fullness of the Park and for the water management mechanisms which are intended to implement.
The singular elements are important landscape marks, defining a regular grid that relates to the scale of urbanization parcels. Offering qualified activity cores, they are the only facilities built inside the edge.
The main peak path polarizes a strip of the park enclosing a clear identity and autonomy. It is a dominant line for reading the landscape, defining the functional relationship and access with the forest park, which runs through the new and most important forest formation, exploring the very expressive duality halfway between trees and marked by viewpoints with grand view opening.
Flat peaks define a secondary system of interpretation of the relief of the place and offer an ample space of clearings minimally equipped.
The Agricultural areas correspond to a short-lived occupation, mainly aimed at enabling the improvement of crop soils through rotation. They may, simultaneously, accommodate well retained informal walkways.
The matrix space occupies the hillsides of transition and is mostly composed of trees, large bushes and large clearings with meadows. These spaces will be main spaces of greater informality and with freedom of use which gradually will fill the areas liberated by the agricultural occupation.