Ecoboulevard-Madrid, Spain

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

An urban intervention as delightful as it is functional.The increased interest in the way in which attitudes to nature can inform the architecture of the city is particularly evident in this unusually powerful combination of architecture, urbanism and landscape, which redefines not merely the way you think about this particular suburban extension, but about the nature of streets as a whole, particularly in extreme climates. The architect has installed ‘air trees’ along a new road which represents the anonymity of edge-of-town extensions while offering a constructive proposition about their future.

The idea is simple: residents can make choices about how they would like to ‘grow’ some aspect of environmental control or modification within the created light structures, that are ‘easily dismantled and energetically self-sufficient’. The notion is that these temporary mini-forests operate until such time as these areas are no longer reliant on air conditioning, at which point they can be disassembled, and left as ‘clearings’ in the urban forest (or jungle). Combining the idea of the tree, the container in which it might sit, solar power and the flow of air through a given structure creates a form of environmental nursery which nurtures growth, and provides a well-tempered environment which acts as a critique of the ‘bad planning’ which made such a proposition necessary in the first place.

This structure looks like one of my students works.
He is doing thoroughfare design, and he uses the concept of GREEN to create a structure in between two rows of shophouses.