36°34'3.05"N | 6°12'34.03"W
The path proposed would recover the forgotten and marginal surroundings for the city, the inaccessible border of some old salt pans. This place, threatened in the past and saved from the speculation pressure, is now included in catalogs of environmental protection and part of the Bahía de Cadiz’s Network of Free Spaces, leisure ground for the growing surrounding population.
Consists of three environmental units:
- “La Salina de los Desamparados” limits the intervention area to the north. These salt marshes are surrounded by dykes who safeguarded the traditional salt processes of the Cadiz Bay. The value of this unit lies in its artificiality: The salt pans are the result of ploughing, and therefore is a landscape built and drawn by man.
- In the centre of the project area we find the “virgin” salt marsh, a natural landscape comprised of marsh vegetation’s plains, crossed by winding sea water channels. In this ecosystem, the channels constitute large arteries through which a very important part of the exchange of material and energy is channeled, maintaining the environmental system.
- “El Pinar de la Algaida” limits the view. Thanks of its lower degree of man intervention; it is without doubt, the most interesting spot of the entire Bay. Despite its natural image it has an artificial origin. It is known that the old forest mass, planted for timber cultivation, was burnt in the War of Independence.
The path attach the three units together. The course was chosen as a thread that bastes the landscape and runs preferably by areas already “ploughed” by man: the return wall from outside the “Salina de los Desamparados” and the existing paths in “el Pinar de la Algaida”.
The materials used follow the criteria of sustainability, using recycled sand and stones from the crushes of neighbors’ village’s debris. When the path doesn’t rest in preexisting, it becomes a railway sleeper bridge allowing the salt marsh channels to flow freely under it.
However, this attitude of charity and recovery brought within it a big risk. Softening the place excessively, erasing in its path the footprints of a recent past marked by abandonment. The intervention had to support something of this roughness and ambiguity we discovered at first sight. For that reason the places chosen for stopping and contemplating the landscape were designed with some “Povera reverberation” like the remains left by the sea in its retreat, turned into an accumulation of timber or rusted metal pieces, a large amount of scrap metal which, half-buried, welcomes the new walkers inside or above them.
The La Algaida pathway represents a type of architecture, which is so broken down that it is hardly noticeable and difficult to detect. It represents hundreds of kilometres of architecture in lower case. Kilometres of architecture, which does its best for us: it invites us to come alive and be prest; it offers us protection and company and possibilities. A positive action, which assumes its commitment to contemporaneity without speeches, without rhetoric and without superficiality. It is social because it is cheap; it is sustainable because it is practically nothing; it is recycled because it hides rubble and waste, turning it into an efficient technical instrument and it is poetic because it is necessary, which is beautiful because it is true. There is a form of architecture, perhaps the best, which is “not there”, or not perceptible. This architecture is doubly difficult to find or detect, due to its being rare and unnoticeable. It is an architecture that doesn’t demand anything, it simply gives, to someone who uses it. However it has demanded a lot more than any other form from the person that created it, put it forward and developed it. On the part of its creator, it has demanded an enormous effort, which one shouldn’t notice, an excellent eye, a dedication, an accompaniment, a keen attention to the invisible bonds that tie us permanently to a given place; a need to be in everything and in this being, to renounce everything and disappear.
Location: El Puerto de Santa María, Puerto Real. Bahía de Cadiz, Spain
Architecture: ACTA (Javier Lopez Rivera/ Ramon Pico Valimaña)
Collaborators: Sara De Tena: Architect, Marta Villanueva: Architect, Javier Reina: Photography
Contractors: UTE Hormacesa-Glesa
Area: 1,5ha
Design: 2002
Construction: 2008
Cost: 962.917,79 €
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Sources:
http://www.estudioacta.com
http://www.landezine.com
