The Excity

TEAM DATA

Team Representative: Lluis J. Liñán (ES) – architect
Associates: Andrea Gimeno (ES),  Josep Vicent Lluch (ES) – architects

rellam, C/ Maestro Sosa 34-11, 46007 Valencia (ES)
+34 666 890 296 - hello@rellam.org - rellam.org

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^{J. V. Lluch, A. Gimeno & L. J. Liñán}

INTERVIEW
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1. How did you form the team for the competition?

We formed our small office, rellam, in 2012, and we have worked together ever since. Although we normally collaborate with other friends and colleagues in many of the projects and competitions, this time we did it on our own.

2. How do you define the main issue of your project, and how did you answer on this session main topic: the place of productive activities within the city?

The main ambition of our project was to speculate on the possibility of treating waste as a productive resource in the future development of European cities. From this standpoint, we imagined an "Excity", a city that brings back to life the materials disposed by the city of Warszawa and turns them into its essential resource from a social, economic and educational perspective, in order to test the urban potential of circular economy.

3. How did this issue and the questions raised by the site mutation meet?

To some extent, the site is a residue of the city of Warszawa. It is an area that holds several abandoned factories and a couple of additional industries (garages, construction materials, etc.) that are usually concealed and displaced by contemporary cities. In this regard, it became an interesting scenario to test the development of an agonistic project that took advantage of this forgotten condition to imagine an alternative way of understanding the city.  

4. Have you treated this issue previously? What were the reference projects that inspired yours?

We have been working on the ideas behind the Excity for a couple of years now, and we already had tested them from an academic perspective. In this sense, the topic of Productive Cities appeared as a great opportunity to turn these ideas into a specific architectural proposal and we are very happy to see them awarded as such.

5. Urban-architectural projects like the ones in Europan can only be implemented together with the actors through a negotiated process and in time. How did you consider this issue in your project?

The scale of the site and the openness of the brief made clear, from the beginning, that this was just the starting point of a long-term reflection on the potential development of this area of Warszawa. With this consideration in mind, we decided to be as intense and speculative in our proposal as we could in order to, perhaps, produce a project that acts as a trigger for a collective conversation that ends up producing a part of the city that goes beyond the usual ways of approaching urban design.

6. Is it the first time you have been awarded a prize at Europan? How could this help you in your professional career?

It is. We hope this award helps us in two different ways: firstly, to continue developing the ideas behind the project both in the academic and professional fields and, secondly, to participate in the conversations around European cities that stem from the competition. We are really looking forward to taking part in the discussions and meetings to come.