Back to Park

Year: 2015

Function: Gardening, Landscape, Production, Education

Site location: Vienna (Austria)

Institution: ETSAM – Polytechnic University of Madrid

Nationality : Spanish

Contacts: abdportfolio.tumblr.com // Instagram: @serbarroco

City and date of birth : Vitoria (Spain) 31/08/1990

Tutors: Mónica Alberola Peiró, Fernando Inglés Musoles

-Training Centre for the Austrian National Gardens-

Since the beginning of the 17th century, the Augarten area (situated north of the historical city centre) has played an important role in the history of the city of Vienna.

After an interesting historical situation, a baroque park was designed, which was quite popular amongst the Viennese until the 20th century. The park suffered severe damage during the Second World War. From then on, it has undergone a gradual recovery process, making it once more a cultural, social and natural centre.

 

The proposed intervention aims to be the finale to this process, recovering the last piece of the park and giving it back to the city.

This piece is located in the southwest of the park, in the border between the gardens and the urban fabric. This irregular piece of land has existed as an exceptional part of the park since the very first design: it was the orchard that provided the Court with vegetables.

With the objective of recovering its gardening function, deep research has been carried out into the needs and work program of the public organism in charge of the conservation of historic gardens in the country. The result of this research allowed to determine the program to be implemented in the place:

-A flower and plant market (public program), which will allow the diffusion of the work carried out in the place, as well as the historic gardening tradition.

-A dormitory for the gardening students trained by the Austrian National Gardens (private program).

-Cultivation facilities (semi-public program), both indoor (glasshouses) and outdoor.

The program will be organized following a public-to-private axis, according to which the market will be in direct contact with the park entrance, while the dormitory will be placed on the opposite end. The semipublic program will be disposed in between.

Every built part of the program will be solved following the same system: a combination of narrow and wide bays. According to this system, the narrow bays will constitute the serving and technical spaces, while the wide ones will be the served spaces.

This logic will be applied differently in each part (market, dormitory, glasshouses), according to the specific functional, technical and constructive needs of the program.

Obviously, it has been necessary to deal carefully with every aspect of the gardening techniques In short, several weaknesses have been detected in the traditional cultivation processes. For this reason, it has been proposed to solve these deficiencies by designing two different “cultivation modules”, which meet the requirements and also partially simplify the processes by combining different variables.

Special attention has been paid to sustainability. The calculations and design of the general watering system guarantee that 50% of the water needs will be covered by recycled rainwater.

 

Author: Andreas Benéitez Domínguez