THE LABYRINTH Qiuxu Wei Zac Chapman COMPLEX PROJECT ANATOMY OF A LANDMARK AZCA MADRID 2016
INTRO In 1966, AZCA was imagined to be a lively shopping and residential district, with cultural venues that would reinvigorate Madrid and effectively become the new centre of the city. Decades of compromises, altered planning and re developments have seen the complex become highly heterogeneous and vastly confusing. In the last two decades of the 20th Century, towers arose and brought an influx of globalised institutions which ultimately rebranded the site. It became the capitalist complex that can be seen today, the public arena that was originally conceptualised has been forced to the south and the centre lacks a dynamic urban arena. Stemming from the post war period, the complex’s infrastructure and planning is highly charged with ideals of post modernism and often, references to antiquity can be seen throughout the site.
The quality of the complex is derived from the tunnel labyrinth enveloping and piercing underneath and throughout. The tunnels provide spaces that have recorded traces of human activity and given the site a historical or at the very least reference to the past. Where one could interpret the site as lacking a heritage and a program that thinks only of capitalist progression, we consider the tunnels to be the sites very dynamic heritage. We conceptualise AZCA as a series of defunct public spaces that have become theatres for human actions which require some architectural reinvigoration. Therefore we propose a highly contextualised solution where we intend to design a labyrinth gallery for grass roots artists. By bringing a logic to the tunnels we can increase their permeability and way finding on the site will become easier, but at the same time tap into the light and spatial qualities of the existing tunnels. The tower will become storage and artist studio space to facilitate this gallery and bring a cultural demographic into the site to blend with the existing capitalist demographic.
Conceptually we envision this tower as an extension of the underground sprouting vertically. As our intervention plans to take on as much of the existing site as possible, we propose to keep the existing ventilation shaft of Mahou and apply the analogy of the vertical tunnel to it while at the same time giving something back to the site. That is, we have also recognised the amount of pollution existing in Madrid as being highly problematic, therefore the shaft will act as an air filtration system and clean the air from the underground carparks and release it into the complex.
PLANNING PROCESS