___

Tittle: TRAVELLING THROUGH AN INFRASTRUCTURE: FROM THE SEA TO THE SALT-WATER MARSHES OF TORREVIEJA

School: UNIVERSITY OF ALICANTE

Tutor: JOAQUÍN ALVADO

Year: 2013

___

The main purpose of my final project is the journey from the sea to the salt-water marshes of Torrevieja, which establishes a connection between the different landscapes (urban, natural and industrial) that characterize the city of Torrevieja.

The project was born from 5 essential ideas which created some questions that invited me to think and solve, these are:

ESSENCE 1

How to increase the value of the landscapes running in perpendicular to the sea and not that which are parallel to it. Why Torrevieja is composed of 3 independent cells: urban area, natural park and salt industry? UNSUSTAINABILITY. Why do not try to find a feedback between them to the overall enrichment of the city?

ESSENCE 2

Shared infrastructures, shared spaces, shared functions and shared landscapes. To apply  the same strategies  which we can find a few meters from the project, where the dam is both a dam and a promenade at the same time. SUSTAINABILITY. Why not use the existing infrastructures or renewing those from the past to give them a new significance?

ESSENCE 3

Continuity of the infrastructural path. Why does the citizens’ infrastructure have discontinuities while the infrastructure of water(canal) and the infrastructure of  salt doesn’t?

ESSENCE 4

Different Landscapes / Different Strategies

I detected 6 different landscapes in which I analyzed what agents inhabit and affect the area (vegetation, birds and infrastructure) and what sort of infrastructures/constructions  and nature shapes them in order to determine the intervention strategies needed in each landscape.

ESSENCE 5

Section changes. Not only is the journey purely lineal, but it also expands superficially and contracts.

Regarding the resolution documents of the project, I designed 2 detailed planes in a different scales, which show the importance of the zoning of the existing/native vegetation (halophytic plants, halophytic plants-marsh vegetation, pine- scrub). This vegetation will appear in function of the height and, therefore, in function of the floods/ground moisture, which is the key to reading the plans.

In this first diagram: “the landscape as an urban infrastructure”, my strategies are: recovery, reintegrating and revaluation of urban nature(being able to understand them as an extension of the natural park and a revaluation of the canal).

In the second map: “regenerated landscapes, emerging landscapes and industrial landscapes” my strategy is the gradual shift between that which is merely industrial and which is natural, researching  the rich coexistence between them and rescuing what has been forgotten and disappeared because of industry.

Once having clear landscape strategies to follow, I reconstructed the different stages/instants of the journey from the sea to the salt-water marshes of Torrevieja, where we can see that the canal is the protagonist until we reach the salt-water marsh. Finally I invite to take the journey.

High resolution images click here

*recorrer una infraestructura. del mar a las salinas de torrevieja. from Adrián Segura Sánchez on Vimeo.