2001 | Bilbao | Artificial beach. The Space Left Over.
In the future, no more coal freighters will be docked in the straight edge of the pier. No more trains of rust will circulate over the geometrical wharves once conquered to the estuary. Neither the tides will be denied. Or the water will be black.
The easiness and multiplicity of the information age, the cultural exchange and freedom will substitute the old-fashioned frontier of the pier with the diffused edge of the seawater over the undulated plane of the beach.
The opportunity that Bilbao offers as paradigm of conversion of the old European sites into part of the still unknown global city is not to propose one pixel, but a changing place, without boundaries and with erased edges. The goal of the renovation of the Nervion estuary should not be the admiration of the age of steel but a non-monument to diffused and mobile boundaries.
The violent revolution of the steel age derived into the flexibility of social boundaries. The softness of the information revolution must also blur the heaviness of physical edges so they can be substituted by the wise freedom of change. It would be an empty space, without the rusted trace of a cruel epoch, which at the same time is freed of the distrust of a global present. It would be a space nurtured by the water and given to the time of men.
It would be a shapeless space, now opened to the softness of the moon while reflected over the water.
Existenzmaximum.
As opposed to modern paradigms as the «existenzminimum», today we must offer the «existenzmaximum». This implies a suitable space for plurality and possibility, where «as much as possible» defeats the «minimum needed», both in the housing and urban realms.
The design proposes housing units which give solution to new modern issues as globalization, personality, trust and openness; this will be materialized through the observation of the exterior world, the interconnection and mutability of interior spaces, the privacy and intimacy of each unit and its links, and the generation of a clean landscape.