Hybrid Infrastructural Node - Run Run Run
Hybrid Infrastructural Node RUN RUN RUN is an assemblage of urban farm, locker room, community center collective kitchen and eatery: designed to facilitate the community of the Vallermoso district in Madrid to care for each other’s health and eating habits, and to allow them to use the city as a playground for bodily healing and bettering
Hybrid Infrastructural Node RUN RUN RUN results from the association of: 1) A group of independent farmers distributed in rural areas of the Madrid region; 2) A group of runners that nurture a community of people of different ages and physical conditions that help each other using the city to heal and care for their bodies; 3) A group of young experimental chefs engaged in developing forms of cooking that are both good for the environment, the health of people and the economies and labor conditions of farmers engaged with non-polluting and animal-friendly forms of farming; 4) And an association of urban gardeners committed to caring for the hanging farm that grows at RUN RUN RUN. The architectural design plays the key roles of densifying the unusual encounter of heterogeneous elements (showers, lockers, farms, kitchen) and challenging individualism through community association.
Hybrid Infrastructural Node RUN RUN RUN is a building constructed inside an existing building. The new building is slightly rotated to create a two-story void, that functions as a tempered exterior, where a vertical edible garden is cared for. Inside, a small number of elements, unapologetically laid without articulation in a continuous space, allow for a time-evolving multiplication of activity adjacencies. An elder woman takes a shower after running through the city, while a group of kids discuss with an activist nutritionist, in the same long table where cooks from three different continents experiment with emissions-free low-temperature cooking.
Is this a small architecture? Yes and no. For it has the concreteness of any architecture that caters to an independent local community. But it is actually huge, if we look at the expansion of its effects on the city, used by the RUN RUN RUN community as their space of empowerment; or to the way this node is entangled with a network of farms distributed across the rural territories of the region. These transscalar alliances are what the architecture of the Hybrid Infrastructural Node RUN RUN RUN consists of.
Nothing is disposable at the Hybrid Infrastructural Node RUN RUN RUN. It is constructed to become a lifetime companion for its community. A place, lugar, loci, in all the sense of the words. It is constructed by local producers, each one doing what they do well. Everything done to celebrate everyone’s capacities. RUN RUN RUN is the assemblage that celebrates the intelligences collective achievements are made of. Miguel Ángel and Fernando know how to work with reinforced concrete, and they did the best possible elliptic cantilever staircase. Rubén introduced digital fabrication in his father’s marble workshop, and did a most beautiful dry ensembled flooring. Clara and Joaquín can bend steel plates at their warehouse and they carefully collected recycled skylights and connected them with a green paper-like structure, to create an enclosure. Ana and Inés hung savaged lightpost globes making a vertical garden out of them. They come back every other day to spend time with their plants. RUN RUN RUN’s materiality is not just material, but socio-material. It is not just a collection of products, but an assembly of intelligences, stories and affections.