Give me 5!

TEAM DATA

Team Representative: Ivan Samaniego Piquero (ES) – architect
Associates: Josè Miguel Sanchez Moreno (ES), Eugenia Concha Gimènez-Coral (ES) – architects

C/ Puerto de Navacerrada, 12 7A, 28038 Madrid (ES)
+34 636 331 635 - info@intenso.studio - intenso.studio

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^{I. Samaniego, E. Concha & JM. Sanchez}

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

We have been collaborating together for different projects and competitions during the past year. The funny thing is that whenever we held a competition, one of us was in another part of the world (at some point we were developing a project from Spain, Colombia and Austria at the same time), which allowed us to develop a very interesting dynamic of work, schedules and feedbacks. The one who was abroad had always the most critical view and it has worked very well for us. It is a great team.

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 project approach is to get a "predictable spontaneity", where the city is the result of the users' desires and the dynamic cooperation among individuals, involving dialectic harmony between users and architecture and enhancing social sustainability. Housing schemes aim to develop residential, commercial and social facilities, mixed with the purpose of getting a productive and active city throughout the whole year.

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

Šibenik, as a Mediterranean city, has a particular medieval urban fabric, especially interesting for its void spaces between edifications. What makes this kind of city liveable and attractive is that fact: they were made and developed through the years with a common factor, the human scale. They are used, lived and enjoyed at a 5km/h speed. The urban design proposal starts at the human scale spaces. From the social interaction to the urban network.  

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

The proposal is like a playground composed of two parts, a physical place and a set of regulations. The main goal is to achieve flexibility, diversity of buildings and spaces and to preserve the public and attractive character of the proposal's interspaces. The designed city prototype searches for a flexible density. It can always grow (with limits), but the public spaces will grow proportionally. As architecture conciliates its shape after mediating with the programme necessities in a long-lasting refining process, potential users engage in a building curating process, and play a key role to achieve an easygoing balance between complementaries, defining the place of their homes and constructing the neighbourhood.

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 proposal of an architectural structure that conceives both programmatic and semantic changes, allows for interpretation, presenting screens and stages onto which individual ideas can be projected. It places the local actors and eventually users as the central roles in not only the performance and evolution of the site but also its main present and future conception. Even if technologically complex, the different elements that configure the structure, equipped plane, flexible space partitions, facades and shade roof are tested existing building systems. Their implementation in time (prior to the public appropriation) responds to the logic of understanding a first naked physical support as an infrastructure that literally supplies the space with the stimulation of a possible and un-programmed future instead of its framing, shaping, ruling and, thus, finishing. Consequently, we addressed feasibility as the result of new patterns of occupation conceived in long-term based processes of individual and collective appropriation and urban lifestyle. Strong and permanent social links with the site, based on the central role of the people for whom and by whom it is conceived, provide reliability for durability, conservation and adequacy to the changing needs of the city, but also for the ongoing creation of new unexpected elements that fulfill the ultimate goal of the implementation of an Innovation Hub.

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 the first time that we have participated in Europan as a team. It is always exciting to be awarded. It encourages you to keep on developing your ideas.