The Water Park
A park enrolled in the green-strip of the Ebro and in its history traces, which assumes its condition understanding that there exists an appreciation to its singular location, a meander of a river full of energy and an owner of its essential dynamics.
The imagined history for inventing the park is to recognize the origin of silver forest, to extend it and to install us inside, placing meadows, planning the layout of the water like those of farmers did. Our ambition is not to place a brutal drawing on the site but to leave the ground to express its qualities: on the contrary to the architecture, the landscape is not drawn, it expresses the history of a territory and of the relation that their inhabitants maintain with it.
The park has a purpose to maintain not only its functionality during the avenues but also the role of the meander like an expanding area, which offers a space of undercurrent and natural filtering through the vegetation; therefore the river can dissipate energy and to lead back water down. The areas of bath, the more designed parts and the buildings are protected from flood while the river forest, as is needed by its nature, will be covered by the Ebro waters, redrawing the parks edge.
In order to materialize this idea we have made a silver-plated palette, made of vegetation, water, wood, stone and light, that we used to compose the vocabulary of the park with four decisions.
The continuity of the green-strip of the Ebro: The vegetation
The alluvial forest has been reduced to make place to agriculture. The Park gives back a considerable part of the meander to the silver vegetation of the river forest. The ecological green-strip of the Ebro will find in the meander an expansion space, in a gradation of uses and accesses that give thickness to the borders and its environmental potential.
The transposition of uses
In order to keep the memory of the agriculture and to take advantage of the worked ground and the irrigation system, the agricultural parcels mutate their uses and ways of management and the irrigation drains change the size, transformed in channels.
The resources of the place: The system of the water
An alive system is organized, a route that purifies the extracted water to use it, already cleaned, for playful purposes. The aqueduct and the green lagoons clean the water in order to take natural baths in the swimming lagoon and navigate through the rest. At the end of its route, some water is recycled for irrigation and some is given back to the river through lagoons of infiltration, able to condense a very rich natural life.
The relation with the city: The system of the construction.
The limit of the Park with the city, the District of the Actur, is a porous edge, where most of the constructions are concentrated. In the heart of the meander, light shadow vegetal structures form the park pavilions.