Archipelago Lab

An Atlas of Metropolitan Islands for Madrid

WINNER 2015

Europe - Spain - Madrid

Designer(s): Pedro Pitarch Alonso

English Español

The Archipelago offers a draft project, an action plan, for the European metropolis. This is based on the differentiation of fragments: islands with a concentrated function, regarded as a coherent whole, specifically located in the public sphere and the surrounding metropolitan mass. The archipelago succeeds because it addresses the potential of architecture to create urban pockets of meaning and significance. The islands are prototypes of the city within the city. Could this multiplicity help to negotiate the apparently inevitable juxtapositions and incompatibilities of the European metropolis? Can architecture then become the city, while the city becomes a highly congested vacuum? Settings have been given identity and spheres behave as a relational framework for every metropolitan factor. Those scenes are landscapes that can be modified or blurred by the interaction of different agents. Each piece, each scene, each island, behaves as a laboratory. Five concrete cases are presented, based on a compendium of islands that configure the project. Five documents. One for each island: plan, section, elevation, image and axonometric projection. Five situations are itemized, which do not just explain the metropolitan islands separately, but also trace a unified project that constitutes the narrative of the city of Madrid as an archipelago. Instead of analyzing the post-post-condition of the contemporary city as a state of crisis requiring correction, we ought to treat radically immanent conditions of the city as a projective model for the metropolis itself. The desire for stability and the need for instability are no longer incompatible … this city is presented as an archipelago of architectural islands floating in a post-architectural landscape of erased mass, where whatever was once urban becomes a highly congested vacuum.

Geographical Representation of the Atlas of Metropolitan Islands for Madrid


Topological Representation of the Atlas of Metropolitan Islands for Madrid


Lab_1: Altermodern Event [Gran Vía Street as a Building] – a plan


Lab_2: Manhattanismo Castizo [the culture of imported congestion] – a section


Lab_3: Re-Learning for Eurovegas [gentrification + bomb programme] –an elevation


Lab_4: Augmented Domesticity [relational laboratory] – an image


Lab_5: Objet Trouvé [sociological ready-made] – axonometric projection


The Chamber of Machinery [a catalogue of artefacts for the city as archipelago]

text and photo from :http://www.archiprix.org/2015/index.php?project=3394