David Sylvian has chosen as his focus for this new work the spiritual life of the Canary Islands as he interprets it, going back to what is known of the indigenous people, up until the present time. Exploring the physical and metaphysical connections to, and notions of, the sacredness of place.

La Garrotxa Volcanic Zone Natural Park in Les Preses, near Olot, is a unique place made a very special volcanic scenery, the product of the basaltic rock from the Croscat volcano and the tireless work of man in his struggle to eek out a small portion of land to cultivate, levelling plots and clearing rocks and stones and using them for thick stone walls, mounds and huts. The morphological and tactile rough texture of the rock holds the gaze.

The project wishes to enhance the singularity of the landscape and to activate the surprise factor in its discovery.

A narrow line of steel strips marks a path through the space, and the steel, in certain places, supports the mounds that cross it. The broken lines of steel contrast with the rounded masses of rock while opening “new clearings” in initial and intermediary acts.

Located on the road leading to the Fuente Grande spring, the Cortijo de las Colonias hacienda is part of the terraced landscape of the Aynadamar canal, which has supplied water to the Albayzín district of Granada since the days of the Arab domination. However, the significance of the place comes from the sinister activity for which its mill-house was used in the Spanish Civil War: the final prison for prisoners sentenced to death, including the poet Federico García Lorca.

The purpose is to produce, with an economy of elements, a relationship between architecture, landscape, history and archaeology, using as materials the remains of the old mill, the agriculture of the terraces, the water and the symbolism, all of them expanding the notion of place.

The project recovers the memory of this landscape through three paths: Walker’s Way, Water Way and Transparent Way, which, like the lines on the palm of a hand, tell the story of what has happened in this place throughout its history.

Walker’s Way /Water Way

Following an ancient path, the route unfurls like a carpet alongside the recovered canal, introducing into the path the characteristic freshness and sound of flowing water, and some already existing ponds and new rest places, demarcated by some stones which, functioning as benches, tempt the walkers to stop and take a look at the landscape.

The water of the recovered ponds irrigates the terraces of olive trees and garden plots belonging to the villagers, in such a way that, starting from the canal, it overflows and wets the stone of the edge of its pond, flooding it with the words of a poem by Federico García Lorca.

Transparent Way

The last walk taken by Lorca and so many others who died in this place represents the idea of their lives as an unfinished journey, expressed through the metaphor of a shining transparent path, ending in the water and carved in stone poetry

New Kroken Park is a core element in the project for the new centre of Kroken. The idea is to create a public meeting place for the whole neighbourhood, something currently non-existent, to respond to highly different demands corresponding to different age groups and the various seasons of the year. The existing topography with its continuous slope is transformed with minimal movements of land into a sequence of horizon platforms of varying sizes that descend towards the sea. The earth surplus to requirements for the platforms is used to build mounds that act as walls of the terraced spaces, making the northerly banks with the steepest slopes into windbreakers whereas the south-westerly banks, providing the sunniest direction at this latitude (in the polar circle), slope softly and are incorporated into the activities of each particular section. The new topography is matched with vegetation and lighting, another key element in the project. The lighting consists of continuous lines of lamps along the pathways and outlining the individual sections, colouring the snow in different tones, and replacing the variety of summer vegetation during the polar night.

Location: Santander

2005: Final de la obra

Client: Ayuntamiento de Santander

Area: 30 ha

The Master Plan conceives the conversion of this area into a park. Vaguada de la Llamas is a highly singular urban area because of features such as its location perpendicular to the Sardinero Beach, therefore aligned along an East-West axis with south-facing and north-facing slopes; the topography of a valley with a markedly uneven ground; the presence of water in the lowest point of the gully; and its narrow elongated shape (11,000 m long x 300 m wide).

Besides these physical features, we must also add another one that turns the Llamas into a totally unique environment: a significant colony of unique giant reeds in the stagnant waters. They should clearly be adapted to the programme and preserved.

For us, designing a park in Santander is an opportunity to work in a geographical location we had never worked in before. Availing of the Atlantic as an environmental context was a true novelty for us, and something we wanted to explore in all its ranges, not only the botanical and biological ones, but also in those directly influencing the morphology of the project through ecology.

From these premises, the proposal is developed on various levels that will eventually converge in a complex and open project, capable of admitting changes and processes introduced by the city, the weather conditions and the eco-geography of the place.

In other words, the park reconstructs a scenery of what the Atlantic represents from some very rigorous geo-morphological coordinates, connecting Santander to its most endemic environment, that one best representing it and in which it has been best at historically positioning itself, that is, the Atlantic.