Eco Axis BIRMAGEN

The project consists of setting up a territorial and urban axis that crosses two municipalities of the island of Tenerife: Santa Cruz de Tenerife and El Rosario. Beyond its administrative limits, this part of the island functions as a territorial and functional unit. The task is to develop a list of sustainable urban development indicators, check their level of compliance and possible corrective actions on issues related to water use, energy, participation, mobility, and ecology. The proposal is articulated on the basis of the BREEAM_urbanism urban sustainability label, which is complemented by some indicators of the American seal SITES in aspects related to landscaping and soils.

Avalos La Gomera Eco-Resort

In the 70´s La Gomera Island (Canary Islands) was one of the hot spots of the hippy movement. This alternative atmosphere is still part of its charm, and it is due to its singular landscape of steep valleys and green ravines. For centuries, its inhabitants have been dealing with these topographic singularities to the point of developing a local landscape culture or intelligentsia. In the case of the ravines, this consists in developing agricultural platforms on the slopes and the protection of the humid and productive basement from any building development. The system was completed with a series of pulley devices used to carry on stuff from the bottom to the top. The design proposal reinterprets this traditional landscape intelligentsia as a design tool. In this case, the platforms accommodate the hotel rooms, the basement is occupied by a palm tree garden equipped with leisure activities and the pulley devices are transformed into a funicular.

Sustainable AZCA

AZCA is a financial and business district of Madrid. It is organized in the form of a rectangular superblock composed of office buildings, free spaces and commercial galleries on the ground floor. In the 90’s, the interior of the block underwent a process of deterioration and urban degradation, becoming a dangerous and inhospitable place.
The task was to make a diagnosis of free space using BREEAM_urbanismo indicators system as a reference. The conclusions of the diagnosis include, among others, references to the initial budgets of the Management Plan, which contemplated the separation of traffics and uses. This prevents the visual control of the public space, with the corresponding feeling of insecurity.

PGA Catalunya Golf Resort Extension

This plan develops the spatial organization principles and the location’s specific uses for the new extension of PGA Catalunya Golf. It includes a new brand hotel, 83 residential units and several leisure/sport facilities to complement the existing two golf courses. The plan follows two strategies. The first one bets for maintaining the site’s farming productive nature, mixing it with in the new development, including the real estate. The second strategy consists in the restoration of the site’s ecological dynamics, that were deteriorated by its intensive agriculture activity. The plan proposes overlapping the ecological dynamics within the mobility strategy—the functional and the leisure one. The resulting system will structure the uses’ locations and the landscape’s identity for the whole development.

New Tenbel Resort

The construction of the Tenbel resort at the beginning of the 60s, inaugurates the tourist activity at the south of Tenerife, one of the main tourist destinations in the Canary Islands, Spain. The resort has a capacity of 4,000 tourist beds, along with commercial centres and sport grounds. One of its main attractions is the waterfront with a very steep coast and a seawater swimming pool. After more than 40 years, as many with many other resorts in the Canaries, the site has deteriorated and lost competitiveness. The vision consists of developing a strategy for its renovation based in a resort-inside-a resort, like a Russian doll. The resulting new resort or New Tenbel will incorporate a very intense action based on contemporary tourist and spatial eco-concepts and generate new tourist synergies for the renovation of the surrounding areas.

Playa del Inglés Street Design Guidelines

Playa Del Ingles is one of the main touristic areas in the Canary Islands. With more than forty years of history, the current urban layout demands an urgent renovation and the implementation of sustainable and environmental strategies. The structure of the mobility system and the design of the public spaces and infrastructures are the main components of the project´s brief. The solution proposes two main circulation circuits—one devoted to functional traffic and other more oriented to tourist mobility. A bunch of linear boulevards running from the interior to the beaches, complete the new structure of the mobility system and catalogues the different types of streets. The second part of the project includes the design of a selected group of streets which character and section is defined according with its relative position in the new urban structure.

Gadeokdo Tourist Island

The Gadeokdo Island is entirely devoted to leisure and outdoor activities, and will become a globally renowned environmentally-sensitive resort city. The proposed tourist developments are concentrated in three sites, where they share locations with traditional fishing villas that become “development anchors”. The proposed solution emphasizes a transversal occupation of the coast, leaving large empty areas of waterfront as landscape attractions and environmental reservoirs. A set of inland leisure facilities work as alternative attractions to the coastal amenities. Most of the proposed urban fabric is placed on natural slopes leaving flat land for leisure and agricultural purposes. Buildings and landscape schemes are part of the water management system, working as stormwater channels and collectors. The energy strategy includes also geothermal, wind, solar and hydroelectric sources and it allows a self-sufficient provision of water for 30,000 tourists.

Calvia Coastal & Tourist Development

The municipality of Calvia is situated on the southwest end of the island of Mallorca. It has nearly 60 kilometers of coastline and it concentrates more than 50,000 tourist beds and as many second homes which total for more than 50% of the tourist accommodation on the Island. The proposal is based on the geographic system of “cavities” and “convexities” that characterize Calvia’s coast. The design strategy aims to recover and update the development pattern of the first tourist settlements where the “cavities” of the coast hosted tourist enclaves while the “convexities” were maintained as landscape reservoirs. This pattern is the basis of the vivid image that characterizes the Majorcan coast, and an example of the intelligent and sustainable development of the waterfront. The project also includes a model of sustainable mobility and eight tourist enclaves, each with its own unique identity and tourist profile.

Playa Blanca Tourist City

Playa Blanca is located at the south end of the island of Lanzarote and houses about 10,000 tourist beds. Its lack of urban structure is the result of a disjointed development of eight isolated pieces of land. The result is a suburban model, exclusionary, repetitive, inefficient, and lacking in spatial quality. The intervention strategy consists of implementing a new structure based in a new mobility system of two rings: one “functional” and the other “recreational”. A new layout of parks is added by the natural reconstitution of the existing valleys that runs transversal to the coast. A series of open spaces complete the new structure which organizes the urban uses according to the relative position of them within the new urban system.