MADRID

SCALES — XL/S – Urban and/or Architectural LOCATION — District, Area around Gran Vía / 6 Plazas POPULATION — 3,165,883 inhab. STRATEGIC SITE — 823,540 sqm PROJECT SITE — Plaza de los Mostenses 6,432.35 sqm; Plaza de Santo Domingo 7,102.48 sqm; Plaza de las Descalzas/San Martín 4,772.64 sqm; Plaza del Carmen 5,494.73 sqm; Plaza de Pedro Zerolo 4.960,22 sqm SITE PROPOSED BY — Madrid City Council OWNER OF THE SITE — Public POST-COMPETITION PHASE — Construction project

PLAZA DE LOS MOSTENSES José Luis Infanzón Priore — General Director of Public space, Works and infrastructures. City Council of Madrid

1. WHAT ARE THE GOALS OF THE SITE MUTATION? The specific goals proposed by Madrid for Europan 14 lie within the framework of the overall objectives defined for the development of the city: - Encouragement of the productive city; - Territorial rebalancing and social cohesion; - Environmental, economic, social and cultural sustainability; - Improvement of the quality of life and habitability of the urban environment. These goals are materialized in the competition area in the form of the recovery and naturalization of 6 degraded squares containing parking lots at the rear of one of the city’s major thoroughfares — the Gran Vía. This initiative includes the potential to transform these underground car parks, all built in the 1970s.

2. HOW CAN THE SITE BE INTEGRATED IN THE ISSUES OF PRODUCTIVE CITIES? HOW DO YOU CONSIDER THE PRODUCTIVITY ISSUE? The possibility of transforming the underground car parks in these squares is an opportunity to stimulate the idea of the productive city. From an urban planning perspective, it assists the current policy commitment to a complex city with a mix of uses in which production, exchanges of merchandise and residence can coexist in an integrated way. The competition proposal encourages the emergence of hybrid spaces where residential uses can blend in a non-aggressive way with productive, logistical and service uses of the city.

3. HAVE YOU ALREADY DEFINED A SPECIFIC PROCESS FOR THE URBAN AND/OR ARCHITECTURAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE SITE AFTER EUROPAN? This competition is the starting point for the development of a transformation strategy for a series of squares with underground car parks in Madrid’s central zone. It is a complementary initiative that accompanies others aimed at transforming the streets and major thoroughfares in the city centre as part of a new mobility model.

Common Ground

MADRID (ES) — RUNNER-UP

AUTHOR(S) — Diego Martín Sánchez (ES), Noemí Gómez Lobo (ES), Architects CONTACT — furii studio, Tokyo (JP) T. +81 7044091043, hola@furiistudio.com, www.furiistudio.com

TEAM POINT OF VIEW — The proposal focuses in how to reappropriate the underground parking, going from car-architecture to people-architecture. Designed for the car, the parking is a typology that has very specific architectural features. Potential operations are suggested to enable basic habitability conditions. This set aims at being a bottom-up tool for negotiation with citizens, municipality and other actors. Understanding productivity not only from a functionalist point of view but regarding from a social perspective, we mapped the civic tissue of the area. These resilient spaces make Madrid more livable enabling reproductive activities such as caring, repairing or educating. The result is a publicly managed infrastructure that incorporates programmable spaces by citizens in constant readjustment.

JURY POINT OF VIEW — A three-stage intervention strategy is proposed to recover public spaces in the city centre, consisting of “hacking” the underground car parks, moving from “car architecture” to ‘people architecture’. The interest of this strategy lies in its detailed analysis of the different parking types, which results in a toolkit of subtraction and addition operations. In conjunction with participation by local residents, this facilitates a wide range of solutions.

On the Blue Summer Evenings

MADRID (ES) — RUNNER-UP

AUTHOR(S) — Santiago Cifuentes Barrio (ES), Architect CONTRIBUTOR(S) — Eva Cuadrado (ES), Juan Francisco Buendía (ES), Architects CONTACT — Cifuentes Costales Arquitectura, Madrid (ES) T. +34 679551448 info@cifuentescostales.com, www.cifuentescostales.com

TEAM POINT OF VIEW — Gran Vía, the heart of the historic city. An axial urban centrality congested by the constant flux of visitors. It urgently needs to expand beyond its current limits. Our proposal focuses on the extension of this centrality, merging the great commercial avenue with its adjacent squares and streets. A new public space of reference. An urban complex that consists on two sub-systems: 1. Gran vía and its side streets, metropolitan commercial and leisure hub. 2. New perimetral belt, connecting the six squares and expanding the limits of the gran vía centrality through the following projectual strategies: A. Greenscape strategy. Integration of nature into the city centre Green loop, a gentle stroll under the shading trees around the historic city centre. B. Groundscape strategy. Reactivation of the productive activity integrating new uses on the first level of the existing underground car parks.

JURY POINT OF VIEW — This project includes urban green areas as the basis for the recovery of the city and its pedestrian routes, completely transforming the current image of hard spaces. The jury appreciated its proposal of solutions that will vegetate building walls. The jury also appreciated the balance between the transformed public space and the newly generated inhabitable spaces. The proposed public spaces and interiors are of high quality.

AUTHOR(S) — Jorge Martín Sainz de los Terreros (ES), Architect-urbanist, researcher; Miguel Martín Sánchez (ES), Architect-urbanist CONTACT — Expose Propose Politicise (EPP), Madrid (ES) T. +34 650616025 / +34 699581146 info@exposeproposepoliticise.com www.exposeproposepoliticise.com

TEAM POINT OF VIEW — In this project, air is the matter with which new urban environments are built. By foregrounding the invisible, the focus on what counts, as an actor in city, is shifted. Different particles and molecules of air are actively involved in the production processes of the city. Hence, air is made visible, or better, ‘sensitised’: air is felt, smelled, experienced, sensed, breathed... The intervention proposes an infrastructure that purifies Madrid´s urban air and, in doing so, it also metabolises by-products from pollution. Our project is a productive infrastructure (called AIR System) that builds environments for, with and through air. The infrastructure consists in a series of air filters—movable and car-like sized—that are introduced in former parking spaces. The polluted air is sucked, cleaned, moisturised, refreshed and aromatised before it is given back to the squares of the city.

Nature Injections

AUTHOR(S) — Miguel Alonso González (ES), Architect

MADRID (ES) — SPECIAL MENTION

CONTACT — Avilés (ES), T. +34 635372078 miguel.alonsog28@gmail.com

TEAM POINT OF VIEW — The urban complexity reached in the centre of Madrid leads to rethink the roles of its infrastructures. The excess of traffic as well as the lack of balance among activities in this area requires making transformations in the most versatile pieces of the urban framework, the squares. Thereby, this proposal aims at converting the existing underground car parks in new facilities. Moreover, the reorganization of circulations and the creation of merchandise distribution centres liberate in large extent the representative spaces from the road traffic. Finally, should be noted the role of the visual permeability between the surface of the squares and the lower floors, what it supposes is an important resource in order to revitalize the urban space.