TANIA MARQUES ARCHITECT

The Project is located in a very strategic point of the path of Madrid Rio Park, between the historical bridge Puente de Toledo and the modern footbridge of Arganzuela.

The plot is nowadays occupied by dwellings built before 1940 with major deficits in aspects like heating or accessibility. Its devastated backyard façade is also a handicap as it evokes a negative visual impact towards the riverside.

 

The main purpose of the project is the total regeneration of the residential block by creating a new urban front towards the city and enhancing the accesses to the park, while respecting the lineal commercial character of the street Antonio López. 

 

The proposal includes a new community services land use and a retail land use, in order to bring the attention of visitors and simultaneously improve the quality of life of the new dwellings’ residents. 

 

The used proposed for this new public space is a culinary school with kitchen laboratories, farm workshops, restaurants, market, classrooms, seminars… 

The program is mostly on the ground floor and on a higher floor, with number of ramps that are submerged, creating patios more protected, or are on the rise, allowing access to the covers of the green buildings.

The building design evolves from a banding structure running perpendicular to the river. The empty spaces in-between the building bands become new pedestrian paths that lead us to the park. Each one of these empty bands has an own functional character, related with the activities held in the neighboring buildings. 

 

All bands are covered by green roofs, consisting of indigenous flowers, herbs and bushes. By incorporating vegetation and green areas, not only in the public ground floor, but also on the roofs of the buildings, a refreshing effect is naturally provided.

Plants and flowers are arranged according to the seasons and in connection with the use associated to each “empty band” (plain green is disposed in the picnic area, trees are plant to create shadows in the commercial boulevard and soft grass is used for the children playground areas).

 

The current houses are replaced by a new social housing block. It is considered imminent to face the construction of social housing valuing a broader concept of what is housing. It is not only the matter of the individual house or apartment, but it should also encompass the whole public area end environ where the social housing are located.

 

It is therefore necessary to provide the social housing, as well as to their environment, equipment and infrastructure that make the area sufficiently habitable as to which the inhabitants may have a proper quality of life. The existence of the new culinary school, as well as the market, workshops and other community uses, represent in this sense an improvement in the quality of life of the houses.

 

The new social housing must cope not only with economic issues, but also with a strictly social approach, studying the new social groups and their needs: students, young people with inability to emancipation, couples, families, singles, divorced, immigrants, the elderly and handicapped. Therefore the social housing have to be, above the economic conditions, flexible, versatile and functional.

 

Based on these assumptions new dwellings with the following features are proposed:

Opened to the city

Modular

Diverse

Flexible

Functional organized

Accurately orientated

Naturally ventilated

Naturally illuminated

Efficient in the use of water and solar energy

Ecological