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MILE ZERO (ETSAM P8_ 2022)

 

"MILE ZERO" is a reflection on the concept of garden and paradise.

First it analyzes the sleeve of the Mar Menor. Its paradisiacal character was the attraction that led to urban exploitation and the development of mass tourism. However, this same exploitation led to the loss of all native vegetation and with it, the loss of this paradisiacal character. This image was replaced by the tourists' idea of paradise: swimming pools, palm trees, lawns, lush vegetation?
And where is the vegetation? Between walls. Nature is private, artificial. As a representation of the imaginary paradise, artificial environments are built and materialized in private gardens.

However, another type of nature and natural exists in the sleeve. Abandoned plots are wastelands, useless to human eyes. They are involuntary gardens, wild, and where La Manga retakes its natural agency.

One of these wastelands is chosen as a location. A plot of 9,900 m2 in which the vegetation is retaking its space.
The project is conceived as an involuntary garden, which is left to be free point this garden is protected by a ring of 1 km and a half perimeter with public facilities. The one-story building with 7 meters of bay and four meters high rises above the ground and is slightly supported to allow the ground to develop as freely as possible. A restaurant, changing rooms, a gym, a cafeteria, a library and laboratories for the treatment of the water of the Mar Menor are organized in a street and rise above a garden that represents the original sleeve that also integrates a natural and filtered water pools for bathing and a lagoon for the recovery of marine species in critical condition.
Finally, above the ring there is a viewpoint that is the object of an intentional contradiction. On the one hand, it allows to observe the sleeve as a reality resulting from mass tourism and urban exploitation. On the other hand, the garden appears as an imposed image of the original and healthy mangrove.

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