CITIES & RIVERS INTRODUCTION

This volume collects, in chronological order, a selection of projects and works built by aldayjover architecture and landscape. Founded in Barcelona in 1996 by Iñaki Alday and Margarita Jover, later joined by Jesús Arcos and Francisco Mesonero, the firm has positioned itself since its inception in the uncomfortable and indefinite space between the building, the public spaceand the landscape. A changing space that struggles with formal definition, and therefore, offers more freedom for design and more opportunities for discovery than the traditional disciplinary approaches to buildings and to gardens.

Contrary to what is usual in a young firm, and often throughout a professional career, we quickly decided to give up the single-family house as a subject of exploration. Although the 20th-century modern avant-gardes used the house as a research opportunity in the domestic space1, 60, 80 or 100 years later this exploration is essentially exhausted. The single-family house remains a fertile ground for formal gymnastics, but the planet cannot afford more irrelevant exhibitionist exercises when they mean the consumption of the territory, the increase of commuting, the unnecessary expansion of infrastructural networks, and the waste of energy and resources through small, scattered units.

Others are the needs of our time to which architects, urban planners, landscaper architects and engineers are called upon to respond. The lack of decent and affordable housing is much more relevant and demanding of imaginative new solutions than the formal exhibitionism of the single-family home or the iconic object. And the same can be said of public services – facilities, green spaces and infrastructure – always at a disadvantage with respect to corporate and speculative interests. aldayjover is part of an architectural culture focused on the public and aligned with the ideals of the project of modernity, not only architecturally (transparency, rationality) but also socially (equity and public service). Spanish architecture at the end of the century, busy solving pressing needs, did not allow itself the luxury of exploring postmodern banality. This political, economic and cultural context is the milieu for aldayjover’s diverse body of work, practically all won through blind design competitions.

Two events of international repercussion mark the period of greatest flourishing of architecture and urbanism in modern Spain. The Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992 exposed a country in transformation to a massive planetary audience for the first time. Since the early 80s, an unusual alliance between public authorities and experts – architects, urban planners, engineers – physically built a new democratic country. An avalanche of civic facilities, social housing, parks, streets and infrastructure began to appear, radically changing what was an undersupplied country – the last European state to free itself from a fascist dictatorship after 40 years. 1992 marked the showcase not only of a country, but also of the work of generations of extraordinarily well-trained architects, on the shoulders of the heroes of the hidden Spanish modernity. At the opposite end of this period, the Zaragoza International Exhibition “Water and Sustainable Development”, in 2008, coincides with the bursting of the real estate bubble and the almost absolute disappearance of opportunities for many architects that the excellent Spanish schools had formed during those almost 20 years of romance between public policy and architectural culture.

However, aldayjover sets itself apart from two aspects that characterize the turn of the century: formal exuberance and the focus on the production of the object. Faced with the formal exuberance that is exhibited with the emergence of deconstructivism and other currents, aldayjover’s line of work is characterized by a formal containment that responds to uses and users, and that is obsessed by the appropriateness of the materiality and tone of the geographical insertion of the project in its context. Our references are the figures of Martínez Lapeña/Torres and Josep Llinàs (training offices of Iñaki and Margarita) and Alejandro de la Sota. Skeptic with the autonomy of the architectural object, a still living legacy of postmodernity, aldayjover understands architecture not so much as a creation but as a transformation of a place. Architecture extends into a continuum that goes beyond the building to incorporate the dynamics of the landscape, public space, infrastructures and agents operating in the territory. This multifaceted and multi-scale perspective develops a voice of its own in a global context of erosion of the role of the architectural discipline. Alternative to the traditional role as a service provider, with the emergence of climate change and the exacerbation of social inequalities, the relevance of architecture must be measured in the ability to formulate the appropriate questions and innovate in new answers. Complex socio-ecological challenges can no longer be addressed with standard disciplinary solutions or gleaming objects.

The first project, in parallel to small reuse and restoration commissions in the old town of Barcelona, positions the studio in that space of no man’s land between the city, the building and the landscape. A bullring, a riverbank damaged by landfills and a small growing town are the ingredients in the Recovery of the Gállego River Banks in Zuera. The project responds to the wishes of citizens, to the environmental needs of the river and the riverbank, to the physical security of the urban area, to the urgency of basic urban sanitation facilities, and to the opportunity that geography offers to guide the growth of the city and its urban quality. But combining all these demands required a complete change of paradigms about what is expected from a building, a park, and a battered back of town.

The same themes continue to appear during the following years, branching out into several lines of architectural, urban and landscape investigation. Water, the relationship between the river and the city, and the project of public space that absorbs and controls floods constitute a consistent line of work. In Zuera, aldayjover produced the first model of public space and floodable architecture of the modern era, which evolves and expands in scale in the Water Park for the EXPO 2008 in Zaragoza, and includes new strategies in the Aranzadi Park in Pamplona or in the Kelani River in Sri Lanka.

The seminal project of the Recovery of the Gállego River Banks in Zuera is also the origin of other lines of research developed by the studio. The powerful and complex physicality of the riverbank – boulders, logs, rocks, earth, organic matter, living systems of flora and fauna – propels the evolution from white, almost immaterial, geometries to an abstraction soiled by textures, raw materials and traces of life. Concrete -on-site formwork with canes or holes or precast- continues to be explored materially and structurally in many subsequent projects. In particular, a number of buildings innovate with structures of thin concrete walls that allow a single material to solve interior and exterior, structures and finishes: the Mill in Utebo, the Las Delicias Sports Hall, and the Power Plant and Video Art Center. The programmatic “perversion” of a bullring open to the river, topographical, floodable and prepared for other uses, has its continuation in the spatial interlocking of the sports center, in the video art center and the power plant, in the civil wedding pavilion and greenhouse of the Water Park, and in other models of programmatic assembly.

The Recovery of the Gállego River Banks in Zuera, once its role as flood management is understood, starts one