RUNNER UP

INTO THE WILDERNESS

Project Description by Team: Soil is a living species by itself. Streets are no longer asphalt and concrete surfaces but open strata for green life and all species to thrive. Traditional car-planned infrastructure is replaced by an ecological lung that spreads towards the entire site, covering it completely with different intensities of wilderness. This new green infrastructure spills into the existing peripheric urbanism and towards the new to be built. Additionally, special care is bestowed on the ground floor areas, becoming transitional spaces that balance living units and facilities. Sustainability, conciliation, caring, and respect for the environment are the urban tools that define "Into the wilderness".

Jury Statement: "The project takes an innovative approach to the relationship between greenery and built volumes. It is seen as an optimistic approach to a new vision for a city. The jury appreciates the proposal of a new “typology of greenery”, where greenery and built space is immersed - all in one. Into the Wilderness proposes a hybrid landscape of a new kind – allowing for other usages and a new understanding.
Nature acts as a central structure, and the concept of a green lung that branches throughout the neighborhoods, gradually evolving into varying degrees of wilderness, is particularly noteworthy. The diverse scales of the buildings structure the neighborhood and also influence the adjacent public spaces through their ground floor functions. An organic form is applied to all the streets, lanes, and pathways of the site, chosen to facilitate the transition of mobility. [...]”

Team Statement: "Since we started our careers, EUROPAN has always been defined in our minds as the competition that gave voice to so many professionals that we admire. Our professors, colleagues and partners had been able to express their ideas of the constantly evolving urban fabric all over Europe. This year’s focus on Living Cities brought pepelacruzarch (Pepe [José] Lacruz) and CRAC (Carlos Rebolo & Alejandro Caraballo) together, after several years of collaborating in different scale competitions, to tackle the task that was given in Vienna. We were interested in the scale and making of contemporary cities, that involved caring and ethical practices for all species, and how this way of thinking, could improve substantially the life quality of its inhabitants. For us, the best way to address these questions was to rethink how the conversation about the foundations of the city itself should begin. Only through hours of dialogue about the boundaries we set in our daily lives, with whom we live, and with the environment around us we could explore how many of these boundaries can we blur, in order to redraw on them a new common ground.“