Lattice-Work

TEAM DATA

Team Representative: Belén Bravo Rodríguez (ES) – architect, urbanist; Associates: Íñigo López Veristain (ES), Ana Martínez Tejada (ES) – architects; Daniel Gómez de Zamora (ES) – biologist; Contributors: Lourdes Durbán García (ES), Juan Antonio Zamora Bolea (ES) – students in architecture; David Ariza Pérez (ES), Jose María Pérez Cordón (ES) – architects

RB Arquitecturas Urbanas
c/ Periodista Manuel Santaella Pérez, 5 1ºD., 18008 Granada (ES)
+34 958565846 / +34 678790212 – rbaurbanas@gmail.com – rb-arquitecturasurbanas.weebly.com

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^{J. A. Zamora Bolea, I. López Veristain, L. Durbán García, A. Martínez Tejada, B. Bravo Rodríguez}

INTERVIEW

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

The team has been designed by RBAURBANAS architecture studio that has been working on architecture and urban planning since 2006. The two co-directors of the studio, Juan Luis Rivas and Belén Bravo, are architects and urban planning professors at the School of Architecture of the University of Granada and develop multiscale projects and research projects at the UGR with the collaboration of students and young architects who share our way of understanding architecture. Therefore, an important part of the team has been students or architects trained in the ETSAG and who has been part of recent urban planning workshops of Juan Luis and Belén. The ecological dimension has been addressed with the involvement of Daniel Gómez, who belongs to the AZ landscape group from Barcelona.
 

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 objective has been to generate a new territorial and urban ecological balance in the place where Paseo de Ladrillares is the main support of urban activities. We understand urban borders as spaces of landscape transition and environments with their own characteristics. Taking as a starting point their traditional allotment of soil and pre-existing constructions constitute identity features necessary to coexist with the new functional needs of Oliva. The foundational traits of a landscape in transition must be revealed to reinforce them and give them temporary continuity through a new urban structure able to overlap in an integrated way the agricultural landscape, the forms of the industrial-artisanal ceramics, the dynamics of water and new urban uses.
 

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

A local transformation process is proposed in which each intermediate phase retains the identity of that non-urban-urban hybrid environment. The ecological connectivity of the place is proposed as well, as an initiatory action and the creation of a series of nodes or centres in which the different urban-cultural-agricultural-social activities are agglutinated. The proposal of network mobility allows us to increase the pedestrian area without damaging the functioning of the nodes, and promote the existence of a domestic rhythm in residential urban gardens and in the creative and productive environment of Paseo de Ladrillares.
 

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

In our project and teaching trajectory, we are familiar with the scale and theme proposed in Europan 15, since we conceive the architecture from its different scales and basis that conceive it built and integrated into a landscape context, and fed from the urban, ecological and territorial visions. Our research is articulated by a multitemporal and multi-dimensional perspective of the architectural and urban design that we try to develop in each work. In the same manner, we usually put the spaces in transition as a spotlight of the architecture project methodology.
The works that have been a reference for our approach are those of Roberto Collová's non-urban-urban composition for urban facilities in Palermo, the latest projects of new ecological connectivities in Catalonia, or the architectural revitalizations of the Tejo riverside in Lisbon.
 

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?

A schedule of actions was proposed in our proposal to adjust the investments and incorporate new urban and territorial functions according to the capacity of the settlement of Oliva to integrate them and get them to work. The project is planned through a gradual transformation of place, which establishes the Horizon 2035 to complete the full transformation of the Ladrillares area associated with the completion of the new access to the A-7 highway. Functional nodes proposed in our project are multifunctional places that favour inclusion and collaboration of private and public actors, agricultural and educational activities, as well as the implementation of a local network that is intertwined in these non-urban-urban borders.
 

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 we are involved in this contest as a team and it has been a very satisfactory experience because of the possibility of expressing our way of doing architecture and giving it visibility. We do not know the consequences that this prize can have on our trajectory, but it does reinforce the confidence in our approaches and encourage us to continue participating in competitions with similar characteristics.

TEAM IDENTITY

Office: RB Arquitecturas Urbanas
Functions: Architecture, urbanism, biology, engineering
Average age of the associates: 34 years old

Has your team, together or separately, already conceived or implemented some projects and/or won any competition? If yes, which ones?

Yes, we have already participated in other national and international competitions since 2004. Some of them are:
- 1st prize in the International Planning Competition for “Formulation and implementation of POT/POD (Regional Planning and Urban planning for municipalities) in the south-central-eastern sector of Colombia” (2016)
- Project Genil Central, 2nd Prize Architecture Competition “Rehabilitación del Paseo del Salón de Granada”, Granada, Spain. (2005) digibug.ugr.es/handle/10481/23309
- Project Slow 08, 1st Prize International Architecture Competition “Flowpolis, the form of nodal space”, Gran Canaria, Spain. (2006) https://issuu.com/gauarquitecturasurbanas/docs/cau01_slow08
- Parkway, Environmental Network, 1st Prize Urban Competition "Strategies for dynamization and revitalization of the Historic City centre of Jaén", Area of intervention "Paseo de Circunvalación", Jaén, Spain. (2012) digibug.ugr.es/handle/10481/27582