The question is how to develop the town in the scalar overlap between the region and the materiality of the object, whilst being responsive both to nature and to town dwellers? How to work in the existing fabric without mortgaging its future development, whilst still expressing a new alliance between nature and artefact? This attitude is revealed in projects by representatives of a new current that is emerging through Europan - architects of sustainable landscapes.

- Gálvez & Wieczorek & Brunelli arquitectos
- Babled - Nouvet - Reynaud architectes
- Arroyo - Guidotti - Pérez arquitectos
- Obras architectes
- Franco, Sentkiewicz and Martínez arquitectos
- AA+U - Partnership for Architecture, Art and Urbanism

NATURE AND URBANITY: A NEW ALLIANCE

(Extracts of Chris Yunès article)

Between Apollo and Dionysus

In his Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes the pair of opposites that are expressed in art. The Apollonian dimension is characterized by order, measure, serenity, formal beauty. Expressed since Socrates in an idealistic culture of distantiation from and rejection of nature, to the point of contempt for the fleshly body, it came to dominate western culture. The Dionysiac dimension, a hymn to life, to nature in man, culminating in an orgiastic sensuousness, is that of the “aesthetic instinct dormant in nature”; Dionysus is “the dimorphic god, ambivalent, both destructive and beneficent, savage and saviour”. Three particularly significant architectural stances – hybrid, merger and connection – express forms of practice that lie between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac.

- Hybrid

From a perspective of sustainability, the OBRAS studio favours strategies in which the scales of the material and the territorial are interwoven, like a hybridization of the artificial and the natural. The management of the relationship with nature is assigned to technical devices for controlling rainwater, sunshine, wind, cold, heat... In Ereta in Alicante (Spain, Europan 4 winning project), the routes through the historic town extend onto the reclaimed hill... “The park brings together the different dimensions of the earth: the sea, the mountains, the horizon… the shade of an olive tree, the cool of a pergola, a restaurant table.” In Versailles, the historic layouts that had sought to control the land meet the plant-covered hill opposite. Saint Nicolas Park in Le Havre (France) “is simultaneously part of an internalized geographical landscape (the presence of the river, the perception of the horizons), of a political position (the establishment of new permeabilities and balances with the harbour area, restoring the dignity of obsolete neighbourhoods) and of an internalized geometrical and material landscape: layouts, scarified, worn and striated earth, cast-iron, concrete and sand stone”. In Toulouse, fingers of countryside permeate the lines of buildings, so that people can live in the city while still feeling close to the country. What is being sought in these different projects is “the golden mean, order, a balance between the effort made and the effect obtained”, reflecting the Apollonian aspect of art, together with a permeable boundary between building and nature achieved by a ground geometry that allows access to untamed nature.
Carlos Arroyo, who handles hybridization in a completely different way, relies on the reversibility of spaces and on vegetalization, as well as on environmental and ecological factors, whether in the Europan 6 winning project in Toledo – which presents a habitable structure that is a hybrid of building and garden with multiple potential uses – or in Seville, where the most significant building is a block in which the roofs become gardens where cows graze! The olive tree centre is a radical reference to the wider territory and the perception of matter as living.

- Merger

The BNR agency uses scales and layouts that link tamed nature, territorial matrices and wild nature to find other boundaries and other thresholds between privacy and shared outdoor space. In Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis, France) and in Nancy-Maxéville (France), within very compact spaces, extreme care is taken with the orientation of the layouts, with the land divisions, with the systems governing the relation to neighbours and to the outdoors (gardens, balconies). There is also a close focus on the consonances with patterns and scales that structure the dynamics of the land. In Quarrata (Italy), the original agrarian distribution reveals a scale and direction for introducing a new landscape. In Saintes (France, Europan 3 winning project), the crisscross texture of the strips in the Bassompierre plot creates a delicate balance between shared, inherited land, both archaeological and tectonic, and the intimate garden protected by the stone walls of the alleyways. It emphasizes both a geographical and historical community and a retained individuality. The layout of the square creates balances between design and wild nature. The rhythms of the river are combined with artifice to establish an urban environment: a new town centre is created by bringing together the two banks of the Charente. Instead of building great dykes, the untamed rise of the river in spate is allowed for in the variations of the dimensions of the square and in a floating bridge. A diversified range of vegetation (aquatic, amphibian, earthbound) brings a river landscape into the town. Maria Auxiliadora Galvez opts for a more radical quest for Dionysiac merger through a passionate hybridization with the immediate environment in an architecture that connects with the world of the river and the world of sensation. The projects mark boundaries less strongly, but asserts a return to well-tried nature. The Cordova project (Spain, Europan 6 winning project), which seeks – within a natural landscape – to establish a fluid and flexible boundary between the river and the urban fabric, takes on organic forms: the intention is to create a continuous “micro-environment” on the banks of the river so that, once built, the area should always be seen as a park, and so that this interweaving improves its climatic conditions while giving people the impression of living in a forest of trees, both inside and outside their homes. The municipality imposed a compromise, but the project allows the river landscape to permeate the neighbourhood and the architecture. In this programmed, as in the kindergarten and nursery school, in the skating rink in Madrid (Spain), in Guadalmellato Canal (Cordova), the primary elements (water, fire, earth and air) – together with vegetation – are at the heart of the project and the transparent materials are worked in such a way as to become sensory resonance boxes. Bioclimatic techniques are used to promote sensory contact.

- Connection

In the different projects mentioned, the wider landscape and the proximity of natural elements form a background for open public spaces. They create connections. In this way, David Franco and Renata Sentkiewicz creates an artificial connection in Tromsø (Norway, Europan 6 winning project) by introducing a highly charged natural landscape into an environment of infrastructures. Within an inhabited park, they develop urban rooms that are like public lounges that the townsfolk can use and adapt for different purposes, yet which fit into the existing topography. In Heraklion (Europan 4 winning project), Socrates Stratis aims to reclaim waterfront land. In the tradition of public spaces in Greece, planned spaces are combined with other uncontrolled spaces, with the aim of connecting with a natural and artificial, private and public, and creating a hybrid between the local and the translocal.
Developing new connections between nature and the city is a powerful way to devise new configurations in which the world can be shared in affinity with the Outside. Beyond perspectives that see nature as a lost paradise or a hostile environment, and human beings as intruders or masters of the world, this quest for natural-artificial patterns and conditions of urbanity constitutes a critical and alternative aesthetic and ethical expansion.