NEW NATURES INTERMODAL STATION IN LOGROﾃ前 ﾃ。ALOS+SENTKIEWICZ ARQUITECTOS
NEW NATURES: INTERMODAL STATION IN LOGROÑO Urban planning project, intermodal station, urban park and five residential tower blocks
ÁBALOS+SENTKIEWICZ ARQUITECTOS
EDITORS INMA E. MALUENDA & ENRIQUE ENCABO PHOTOGRAPHS JOSÉ HEVIA
Publisher Q! estudio, comunicación y medios para la arquitectura Plaza San Juan de la Cruz 9, 8º izquierda 28003 Madrid (España) q.estudio@yahoo.es www.q-estudio.com T +34 91 535 29 02 Editors Inma E. Maluenda & Enrique Encabo Photographs José Hevia Text corrections María José García Translations Beth Gelb Graphic Design gráfica futura + Q! estudio Printing and Production Brizzolis, arte en gráficas
© of the edition, Q! estudio © of the essays, their authors © of the photographs, their authors © of the translations, their authors All rights reserved ISBN 978-84-616-5441-3 DL M-22842-2013 Distribution ActarD, Barcelona—New York www.actar-d.com Printed and bound in the European Union Madrid, July 2013 Note All efforts possible have been made to contact and credit the authors and owners of the copyrights of the images and texts used in this publication. Should there by any mistake or omission, please contact the publisher, Q! estudio (q.estudio@yahoo.es), so that the appropriate corrections can be made in future editions. No form of reproduction, distribution, public communication or transformation of this work is permitted without the prior authorization of its owners, with the exceptions covered by the Law of Intellectual Property, no. 23/2006. Permission to photocopy or scan any extract from this work may be obtained from CEDRO (Centro Español de Derechos Reprográficos, www.cedro.org).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
GENEALOGY
07 09 12
Prologue Santiago Miyares Introduction Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Sentkiewicz About the Competition Fragments from a conversation between Manuel Gausa and Federico Soriano GEOLOGY
16 20
New Natures: Intermodal Station in Logroño Stan Allen The Project: dates plans and agents GEOGRAPHY
62 70
Urban caves. An interview with Ábalos+Sentkiewicz Inma E. Maluenda and Enrique Encabo A note about the park Teresa Galí-Izard GEOTECHNIQUES
106 112
How to manage the passage of a train through a city María Cruz Gutiérrez Technical Contributors
The new Logroño train station is the result of a far-reaching urban and rail project led by the company LIF 2002. The design’s integrating nature goes beyond linking the city and the railroad, and therefore also required a consensus and an agreement between the three levels of government involved: Spain’s Ministry of Public Works, the Region of La Rioja, and the Logroño City Council, for a solution to the longstanding problem in the city of Logroño, i.e. the barrier to orderly growth posed by the rail line. From an urban planning standpoint, the project marked the beginning of a transformation affecting most of the city. It will integrate a new residential development and a large park in an area that had been cut off and isolated from the rest of the city due to the rail line. The intermodal transport center will stand as a true hub for the city and the entire region once the building of the new bus station located beside the train station has been completed. From a financial standpoint, this first building phase, including the building of the train station and the surrounding housing development, constitutes the most significant investment made in the region for many years. Furthermore, in these times of great economic hardship, the development of this infrastructure also helps mitigate local unemployment by creating a significant number of direct and indirect jobs. In short, despite adversities, this complex and enticing challenge now has enough momentum and support to successfully complete, over the upcoming years, this long journey towards weaving the railroad into the city of Logroño’s urban fabric.
Santiago Miyares González-Coto Director General of LIF 2002 (Logroño City Council, the Region of La Rioja, Adif and Renfe)
GENEALOGY
7
1997 Ábalos+Sentkiewicz, hotel and convention centre project next to the M-40, Madrid. 2013 Ábalos+Sentkiewicz, Intermodal Station, Logroño.
The first project that we implemented together goes back to 1997. It reflected the conjugation of the interest in entropy as a characteristic of contemporary city landscapes and the need to rethink the appropriateness of tall buildings, the alternative to which was to have the exteriorized characteristics of modern skyscrapers look inwards towards an inner core. The influence of picturesque aesthetics and the passion for drawing a chaotic interwoven conglomerate with crystalline prisms, for the mere pleasure of it, did the rest. Seen with today’s eyes, it is a splendid spree of energy and power. We discovered that there was a “thermodynamic materialism” in what we were undertaking, i.e. the combination of areas to be used collectively, wrapped in hypermassive volumes, basically for generating and storing thermal gains, together with light rooms with enclosures sensitive to any changing climatic parameter (benefitting from the calories/watts stored by the massive portion). This led to a hybrid materiality, both cave-like and crystalline, serving as a starting point for a brief that incessantly generates both consistency and knowledge. The design for Logroño’s Intermodal station, together with the two areas and buildings with which it comprises an indissoluble unit, stands as the first materialization of what fifteen years ago could well have been considered a folly.
Iñaki Ábalos & Renata Sentkiewicz, 2013
GENEALOGY
9
ABOUT THE COMPETITION
Fragments from a conversation between Manuel Gausa and Federico Soriano
The word experiment conjures up much more an end of the century leftover rather than what we would call effective city management. But I defend the need to experimient as something both culturally and financially profitable. And experimenting obviously means innovating, which in turn means trial and error, investigating, exploring. There is certain tendency to take ostensibly controlled situations for granted because of their familiarity. But in today’s world, it is sometimes indispensible to identify with the ambition of generating new models of reference. And that is why a lot of excitement, energy and conviction have gone into pushing forward an operation which would not only represent a new urban conquest for Logroño, but also a focal point beaming new criteria rather than a “model” or a generically applied “formula”. The selection of these five teams of architects was on the mark because while they are unknown for many citizens, these figures in architecture take a new slant on cities to attempt to manage their growth. In these times, there is a certain need to seek new intervention mechanisms that either change the scale of things or project an overall vision of what markets, society, and contemporary spaces mean. Cities can no longer only be conceived by traditionally banking on the street patterns, the streets themselves, plazas, buildings, and so forth. Nor can they be conceived based on the abstraction of modern planimetry. What is required in these modern times is an encounter with the 12
surroundings designed with more open, flexible geometries and profiles. And this must be done on a new “geo-urban” scale that is seemingly outward but that also stakes a claim for inward reflection. It would both denote a clear expansion process and suggest a potential implosion. This encounter with the surroundings or geography is also of interest in the new scenario that does not refer to street outlines or massing, but instead something new, related to alternating scales, horizons and topographies. It all boils down to a new way of working with the landscape. And lastly, on another scale, the infrastructure dimension involves the movement of the city itself and a new interface between city and system, between infrastructure and landscape. And this is of great interest. Cities and more than just cities, landscapes are more than just green landscapes “out there beyond”, and infrastructure is more than just a rig divorced from everything urban. Today, all of these categories can be combined. The winning design is probably the one with the greatest number of paradoxes. And this is perhaps why it brought together the greatest number of ‘significant’ potential features. While it was the most uninhibitedly “compositional”, a great deal of its composition was more critical than conventional as it replaced the traditional notion of urban street patterns with a potential alternative concept based on the contemporary notion of the meeting of city and nature, volume and surface, façade and border.
FOA The FOA design domesticates the vast emptiness of OMA’s immense wild central esplanade. Subject to the regularity of the alignments and heights along the perimeter, it includes small blocks whose structure is both profitable and efficient, all framing in a central boulevard. One can therefore speak of a critical acceptance of well known and thus re-interpreted typologies.
MVRDV MVRDV defines architecture through a very strong image prevailing over the project. Their design reflects the image of disappearance. The city and the trace of the railway disappear while what remains is the undertaking to make them disappear, i.e. the huge amount of earth that needed to be moved to lower the station, the tracks…What is visible is the reminder of what was done.
OMA The OMA design could stand as an example of “wrinkling”, as if the land had experienced an elastic deforming movement by creating a high density superficial fold at a height at one end and a large, horizontally elongated superfical space at the other. Movements of concentration and dialation, filling and emptying, verticality and horizontality are all in balance and reveal aspects of the brief.
WEST8 West 8’s design works more with what could be termed attachments, i.e. green structures which, like vertical hedges and horizontal parterres generate a dynamic in line with a type of probe they themselves have promoted, the so-called vertical gardens.
GENEALOGY
13
Although it seems to “close off” the sector and therefore contrasts a relatively open configuring of bounds, it does no more than generate a strong definition of the perimeter which is highly effective at ensuring that this “enveloping” image that requires architecture to be qualitatively materialized in the future. By accepting this balancing act between laden urban conditions and new cultural values, the design probes a particular interpretation of what is “monumental”, associated with a potential contemporary instrumentalization of scale, nature and brief. It takes all of them beyond old ritual symbology that is nonetheless somewhat akin to certain reflections noted by the authors in their theoretical works. Logroño will reap not only economic but also decisively cultural gains if it is able to promote this opportunity and make something that is “known and unseen at the same time” as ambitiously as the design requires. The design also requires a potential “architectural landmark”. In this case, the new Master Plan rests not only on the “park-station” but on the set of towers that stake it out. Height is not there for height’s sake, but as an element generating density balanced off with a strong degree of connecting horizontality.
What made the winning project so special is the fact that it tackled infrastructural and urban planning problems, landscaping and architectural questions, and ecological and financial matters, all with the same intensity; in other words, with an all-embracing management style which sought quality and innovation at all stages of the process, and which dealt with both the quantitative and the qualitative aspects.
Not only a good urban plan can give rise to a good city. Good archiecture is required as well. Someone asked why this design won. It is because, in a balanced way, through cosmopolitan conception and using a methodology of its own, putting forward a correctly codified and yet opportunely “de-codified” solution, it was able to conjugate both aspirations and responses, local solicitations and global references. That was an asset as well.
31 March 2005 14
GENEALOGY
15
21
22
NIVEL ELEVADO / PARQUE RAISED LEVEL / PARK Parque público peatonal: cinturón verde Public park for pedestrians: green belt Carril bici Cycle track
NIVEL COTA 0 ELEVATION ZERO Circulación peatonal (calles y plazas) Movement of pedestrians (streets and squares) Transporte público: Public transport: Estación de trenes Railway station Estación de autobuses Bus station Taxis Taxis Transporte privado: Vehículos (calles) Vehicles (streets)
ESTRATEGIA ENERGÉTICA
STRATEGY IN RELATION TO ENERGY
Captadores fotovoltaicos, térmicos, eólicos (orientación sur)
Photovoltaic sensors, thermal and wind collectors (orientated towards the south)
Cubierta verde (integración): estación intermodal, acumuladores térmicosy red de distrito calor/frío
Green coverage (integration): intermodal station, thermal accumulators and district heating/cooling network
NIVEL SUBTERRÁNEO UNDERGROUND LEVEL Andenes (estación de trenes) Platforms (railway station) Aparcamiento público (dos niveles) Public car park (two levels)
MOVILIDAD
MOVEMENT
Peatonal: parques, calles y plazas
Pedestrian: parks, streets and squares
Carril bici
Cycle tracks
Estación intermodal de trenes y autobuses
Intermodal station for trains and buses
Mejora climática de la zona adyacente
Improvement of the ambient conditions of the adjacent area
Soterramiento de las vías
Underground routing of the railway lines
Orientación norte-sur de las viviendas
North-south orientation of the dwellings
Vías urbanas
Urban routes
Captación de aguas pluviales y subterráneas (geotermal en viviendas)
Collection of rainwater and subterranean water (geothermal in homes)
Taxis
Taxis
Aparcamientos subterráneos
Underground car parks
23
28
29
32
33
46
47
54
55
48
49
GEOTECHNIQUES
111
The publishing team would like to give special thanks to Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Senkiewicz for the opportunity to publish this monograph, devoted to Logroño Intermodal Station. And for the confidence afforded by Ineco, Prointec, Sacyr, Typsa and Viveros Perica, whose contributions ensured the viability of this publishing project. Thanks are also due to the whole team who collaborated in the tasks of designing and translating, and to all those who, in one way or another, contributed to make it possible, and particularly to Stan Allen and José Hevia. We are grateful to everyone for their commitment and enthusiasm in this project. And to María Cruz Gutiérrez, whose support was essential to its co-ordination and development.