Honorable Mention: Innovative Minds 2012
EWS – EARTH, WIND AND SOUND
Susana Lopez Gonzalez, Dolores Mora, Carlos Gutierrez Iglesias
Red Arquitectos –
Veracruz, Mexico
The cities have become places where nature has often been moved, deleted, causing a metamorphosis in the landscape that leaves no traces of what it was before humans arrived to colonize, submit or destroy it.
The dunes appears in many forms along the coasts, rivers and desert.
The human being tries to stop the sand, uncontrollable and unpredictable at the very least with vegetation, but mostly with different materials and architectural barriers even to the point of vanishing them altogether.
The progress of the city towards the coast has also created the need to stop the ocean with buildings that often are lack of design. We felt the need to control everything. It makes us feel safe.
Veracruz’ coast, former dune area was victim of intense urban growth and poorly planned, making it a degraded space and uninteresting. With this morphological transformation the coast lost sensorial experiences such as the sound of the sand in motion.
Lost topography, forgotten sounds… we want to recover some of the feelings that get lost in time.
RE-naturalize
We want to redo the landscape to recover the formal and acoustic elements of a coastal dune. What was the built form of that nature? We know it, but we do not intend to emulate nature.
The breakwaters (foreign elements but necessary) works in this experience like a great musical instrument, providing sounds like the sand in motion by the wind.
People will enjoy the landscape, and value the nature without the need to control it or feel threatened by it; also walk, relax and enjoy the symphony created by the wind.