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New European Bauhaus Prizes

Reconnecting with nature

Three Landscape Essays
Three Landscape Essays: Movable Ecosystems for Future Climates
Three Landscape Essays: Movable Ecosystems for Future Climates
Spain
Local
Madrid
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
Yes
2022-02-05
No
No
No
As an individual partnership with other persons/organisation(s)

Today we find ourselves as unwilling passengers on the business as usual climate curve, whose most recent projections tell us that we have already missed the Paris Agreement’s target of 1.5 degrees of warming. In the Mediterranean, where our project is located, warming is 20% faster than the global average and, on this particular curve, that means we are witnessing the death of our distinctive climate. Given this impending climate crisis, our project asks a simple question: how do we live on this curve? Three Landscape Essays is a small intervention to think through this question by engaging with the basic contradiction we face: we must confront the material fact of the ongoing destruction of our environment while also cultivating a healthy and optimistic public forum, where creativity, joy, collective action, and social trust can empower us to meet this challenge. Our project is an attempt to build a public space that does both. Each of our three gardens consists of (A) plant species from a key ecological stage on the business as usual curve and (B) programmable public space in an underserved neighborhood. The first garden is composed of the quintessential plants of our Mediterranean Past and it offers a small experimental theater with a perimeter curtain and tiered seating. Second, the garden of our Extravagant Present showcases plants that have been imported to Spain from distant parts of the planet for their spectacular blooms, and offers seating for small informal meetings between friends. Finally, the third is the garden of our Pyrophytic Future, which curates a carefully selected plant list of pyrophytic plants native to Spain that will benefit from the increased frequency of wildfires caused by climate change. The pyrophytic garden has a gentle slope leading up to two sandboxes separated by a hill where children can play. From this vantage point, we can see where we’ve been, where we’re going, and discuss collectively and creatively what we should do.
climate gardens
flexible public space
planting design
water scarcity
wildfires
As Spain gets more arid, low altitude deciduous forests will be replaced by garrigue vegetation, and will move upslope replacing alpine conifer-anchored ecosystems. Crucially, Spain’s garrique species are already well adapted to reset succession in this way, having evolved into some of the most flammable species in the world. Pyrophytes like Cistus monspeliensis and Cistus albidus require high levels of heat to germinate and thrive in the nutrient poor soils that characterize the aftermath of a wildfire. For Cistus and other pyrophytes, the coming wildfires will be hugely beneficial to their distribution. This near-future condition is still poorly understood in Spain, and our project, Three Landscape Essays, introduces urban residents to the species that will increasingly dominate the landscapes that surround them. We believe that gardens have always been places where we express our ideas and understanding of the natural world and for this reason our project attempts to imagine a new kind of garden for a new kind of understanding. Not everything in our future garden is new however. For example, we planted the Madroño (Arbutus unedo) in both the Mediterranean and Pyrophytic gardens. It also appears on the Coat of Arms of Madrid and in the center of the city there is a statue of a bear eating the fruit of the Madroño tree. The Madroño has a large woody underground storage organ (a lignotuber) that allows the plant to regenerate after a fire. In this way, our gardens are an invitation to learn from the past and rediscover its hidden resources in order to imagine both social and ecological forms of climate resilience. Cistus might take over and transform the landscapes we grew up loving, but like us, the Madroño will still be there.
Our intervention takes place in the Central Courtyard of Conde Duque, a large 4,500 m2 military plaza serving as the access point for institutions occupying spaces in the former barracks, including the Conde Duque Center for Contemporary Culture, the Villa Archive beneath the square, the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Historical Library and Municipal Newspaper Library of the city of Madrid, the Digital Library Memory of Madrid, the Benito Pérez Galdós Public Library, and the Víctor Espinós Music Library. Despite its potential as a meeting place for various users and neighbors, its monumentality presents problems of thermal comfort, lack of shade, and high temperatures caused by impermeable surfaces, as well as issues of scale, with a lack of resting places and spaces for play, meeting points for teenagers, and resting spots for older residents in the area or visitors to the neighborhood. Our design seeks to address this by fragmenting the large plaza into smaller spaces framed by our three gardens, which provide shade, increased thermal comfort, and occupiable public furniture for a multitude of events. As flexible public furniture, these gardens allow for the emergence of unforeseen activities and unexpected interactions among the different audiences of the institutions surrounding the space. The gardens are also movable, which allows for summer music festivals and large events to still take place in the plaza. This dual functionality, of providing flexible infrastructure for small improvisational programming as well as space for large festivals with institutional funding, is exemplary.
The design of the movable gardens in this project offers an innovative solution for installing plants on structures with significant weight limitations. Traditionally, the presence of underground levels beneath squares and streets has limited the presence of trees, shrubs, and large masses of vegetation, which require thick substrates accumulating water and thus becoming heavier and heavier over time. To address this, soil engineers helped us design lightweight, fertile terrains, while structural engineers developed a load distribution system evenly spreading the soil’s weight, making these gardens feasible for city streets with
underground levels. Although appearing as large topographies, the gardens are actually hollow, lightened by internal cavities. This system reduces the amount of material needed to fabricate the structures, while evenly distributing the weight of the soil. The weight restriction our project met was 1000 kilos per square meter, as the plaza our project occupies is also the roof of the National Archive. This limitation posed significant challenges to the design, but the result was a project that cost less to fabricate and offers a solution that is applicable to other difficult sites where designers or planners might not anticipate the possibility of introducing plants. We hope our project inspires more plant-based interventions in the urban environment.
The project transformed the square in which it is located from the very beginning in a very positive way. On the one hand, the Centro de cultura contemporánea Condeduque extended its programme to the open air and, on the other, the neighbours and visitors turned the space into a place for meeting and coexistence, for all ages, which is very necessary in such a dense neighbourhood of Madrid. We can testify to how incredibly successful it was as a gathering space, and how many public activities were programmed on each different island. A short list includes art performances, small-format theater representations, poetry recitals, music concerts, gardening and plant identification, and a kids' free playground. While some activities were directly run by the cultural entities that usually operate in the courtyard, others, such as teenagers' music performances, after-school gatherings, and weekend family-friendly picnics, were organized by civic neighborhood organizations. These groups found the new public spaces on the island to be a safe, intimate, yet engaging environment to develop their activities outdoors. Beyond all this, the islands became a place of unexpected coexistence, with birds and all kinds of insects making them their new habitat.
The Conde Duque complex consists of a diverse group of public buildings with a wide variety of stakeholders at different levels. This presented challenges, but it was also very enriching. Although the project for the islands was directly commissioned by the municipal entity of the Contemporary Art Museum, the involvement of the national archive and the various libraries meant that local, regional, and national entities all participated in discussions and provided input for the project. Some of these entities helped identify major constraints, such as weight limits and flood protections due to the highly sensitive materials in the national archive below the courtyard. Others, such as the directors and curators of libraries and archives, provided input and space requirements to help us better understand their needs.
The added value of this interdisciplinary process was the seamless integration of various public programs operating at local, regional, and national levels, all using the courtyard as a new way to relate to one another. Each field's expertise contributed to a holistic and impactful project outcome.
Three Landscape Essays, as a very complex experimental technical exercise, brought together a diverse group of specialists and experts from various disciplines, including design, cultural arts, and humanities.
First and foremost, this project represented a rare collaboration where architects and landscape architects worked hand in hand. The project could not exist without the concept of the three landscapes, and it would not be feasible without considering how the three islands unfold into three public space strategies.
The project also assembled a team of various experts who worked closely with the designers to ensure successful execution. Structural engineers calculated with high precision how to distribute the weight across multiple points without exceeding one ton at any endpoint of the structure. This task was particularly challenging given the significant variation in soil depth and plant density at different points on each island. Additionally, we were assisted by soil science specialists from a company that developed a custom light roof garden soil mix for the project, addressing the steep topography in certain areas.
We also partnered with one of Madrid's most innovative construction companies, renowned for its expertise in building set designs, producing furniture prototypes, and creating ephemeral art pieces. Their willingness to experiment with new materials and finishes, such as the organic black rubbing used on one of the islands, was crucial for advancing our ideas.
Finally, we collaborated closely with cultural agents, museum educators, and public program coordinators from all the civic buildings that share the courtyard. Through this collaboration, we defined the spatial needs, embraced the community diversity of the neighborhood, and delved into the cultural identity of the future occupants of the islands.
As we were designing this project, we toured many of the public spaces in Madrid’s city center that had recently been renovated. Many of Madrid’s most visited public spaces had new plantings, and we were surprised to see that they all required irrigation. The plants that now define and shape Madrid’s public spaces are almost entirely non-native plants with high water requirements. As part of our commission to build our project at the Conde Duque Cultural Center, we were allowed free access to select plants from Madrid’s municipal plant nursery, where many of these plants came from. To our surprise, we could find very few of the plants we needed to complete our three gardens. Native Mediterranean plants were few, and the garrigue and dehesa species of its traditional landscapes were non-existent. This meant that we had to devote an unexpectedly large part of our budget to sourcing native plants from as far away as Catalonia and pay for them to be delivered to Madrid. We believe an important part of our project is to demonstrate the low water requirements of the plants we selected, and showcase their capacity to produce beautiful gardens with a fraction of the water requirements of the plants currently being utilized in the city. We believe we may be the first to incorporate plants like Genista, Spartium, Cistus, Santolina, and Phlomis into public spaces in Madrid, despite their ubiquity in the iberian peninsula and their strikingly beautiful forms. Our project advocates for a radical rethinking of how we select plants for public spaces in rapidly aridifying cities.
Methodologically, our project began by analyzing the Conde Duque Cultural Center plaza as an anthropogenic environment. We built temperature and sun/shade models to understand where the hottest and driest parts of the plaza were, as well as the parts of the plaza that received long hours of winter shade. Crucially, we had to also build a separate model that took into account the stadium seating that was constructed for the summer music festival, as this seating also placed our gardens into shade. This allowed us to understand where to place the gardens, and how they needed to move. Once we understood the climate of the plaza, we could begin designing the planting plan from a list of plants that would be able to thrive in these conditions. From a list of over 400 possible plants, we chose between 12 and 25 for each garden. However, some of these plants required deeper soil than others. Since the plaza was also the roof of Madrid’s National Archive, we had to balance the 1-ton per square meter weight restriction with the soil thicknesses needed for our specific plants. This generated a series of possibilities for where the structure would allow deeper and shallower soils, given our ability to distribute the load, particularly when the soil was wet. With these parameters in place, we could then start to analyze the possible garden forms to look for opportunities to make the space occupiable in order to catalyze different kinds of public activity. Finally, we also had to consider maintenance. The gardens needed to be easy to water, and watered very infrequently, given the resources of our public partners. In order to arrive at the forms you see in this design, we had to balance these five variables: sun, weight, maintenance, social activity, and ecological narrative.
"Three Landscape Essays" was initiated as a prototype to explore new ways of utilizing impervious surfaces in urban settings. These surfaces often conceal underground spaces and urban infrastructure, limiting the potential for landscape interventions. During the project's press release, the cultural city councillor of Madrid presented it as a landmark initiative, emphasizing its role in demonstrating how urban hard surfaces could be repurposed for the benefit of citizens and the environment.
Following the success of the Conde Duque project, various entities have expressed interest in replicating the concept in other urban areas. Recently, the proposal was chosen for development at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. The event, titled "INTELLIGENS" and curated by Carlo Ratti, aims to generate and test new solutions through acts that allow for feedback and risk-free experimentation.
Many of the materials and systems developed for the Conde Duque project are adaptable for use in different parts of Madrid, Spain, or even internationally. While the project's Mediterranean vegetation and themes are site-specific, the overall strategy of reconnecting urban residents with their regional landscapes can be implemented in major cities around the world.
"Three Landscape Essays" addresses two significant global challenges concerning the future of urban public spaces. The first challenge is the pressing need to adapt urban environments to the evolving climate crisis. In Madrid and much of southern Europe, this crisis is marked by phenomena such as heat waves and prolonged droughts. These extreme conditions necessitate rethinking public spaces to enhance resilience and sustainability while catering to the comfort and needs of communities living in densely urbanized areas with limited access to vegetative spaces. The large, impervious army courtyard of Conde Duque serves as an ideal example, situated in one of the most densely populated areas of the city.
The second challenge is the estrangement of citizens from the landscapes and vegetation native to their regions. In Madrid, Mediterranean vegetation, which is most representative of the local landscape, is absent from public spaces. By integrating Mediterranean vegetation, as opposed to the exotic plants commonly used in the city's public areas, we offer citizens an opportunity to reconnect with the landscapes they inherently belong to.
This approach not only promotes ecological balance but also fosters a sense of identity and belonging among the city's inhabitants. Combining traditional native landscapes with modern urban needs can lead to more sustainable, resilient, and community-friendly public spaces.
Three landscape essays had a brought and very diverse impact on the Conde Duque courtyard during the short period they were operational. The list of activities taking place in these spaces is long and diverse, as described above. However, one of these activities particularly stands out for its critical reflection on the reconnection with nature that the three islands provided in such a harsh environment: "Re-vuelta en el patio." (check out video of the activity https://www.condeduquemadrid.es/actividades/revuelta-al-patio-2024-2025 ) This activity consisted of a series of public playdates for children, where they not only engaged with the topographic floating landscapes but also explored and learned about the flora planted on the three islands. These activities, which began as spontaneous gatherings, evolved into incredible spaces of exploration for entire families. They engaged with plants that redefined the courtyard of Conde Duque, making it more approachable, playful, human-scaled, and lively than it had ever been, according to the neighborhood inhabitants.