XML Wins 1st Prize in Europan Competition Tallinn and Honorable Mentions in Madrid and Munich
By Bustler Editors|
Wednesday, Jan 20, 2010
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Dutch practice XML has won the competition for Europan 10 in Tallinn and received honorable mentions for its proposals in Madrid and Munich. Europan is a biannual, pan-European competition that aims to bring to the fore Europe’s young architecture and urban design professionals by realizing the prize-winning proposals. Over the period of twenty years that the Europan competition has been held, XML is the first office to be successful in three respective Europan sites at the same time.
First Prize: Europan Competition Tallinn by XML
TALLINN
XML’s winning proposal for Tallinn, ‘Green Cement’, consists of an urban strategy and two new buildings for the waterfront of the city center of Tallinn. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was a prelude to Estonia’s independence, the country has experienced a period of turbulent growth. A quick analysis shows that, for Tallinn, the economic boom and the explosive increase in building activity of the past 15 years has materialized in the form of urban sprawl. Now that the global recession is strongly impacting on Estonia’s economy and construction activities have slowed down significantly, the proposal aims to evaluate Tallinn’s urban condition and utilize this breathing space to formulate new urban scenarios for the future.
First Prize: Europan Competition Tallinn by XML
Automatically allocating programs to all undefined areas within a sprawling city means that scant available resources must be distributed over a multitude of needs. Instead this proposal focuses on a strategy of creating contrasts. Here, differences between various parts of the city are reinforced by filling undefined areas with woodlands. The woodlands provide the ‘Green Cement’ needed to bind Tallinn’s fragmented structure and transform it into a modern metropolis characterized by clearly delineated public spaces rather than an endless sprawl of indistinctness.
First Prize: Europan Competition Tallinn by XML
One of the fragments in this new urban landscape is the cluster currently containing the Cultural Factory, the Linnahall, the new City Administration Building. This site plays an important role in Tallinn’s program when being the Cultural Capital of Europe in 2011. XML’s proposal introduces two new market halls within this cluster. These ‘Market Twins’ are two rectangular generic halls, which house the fish market, and the food and design markets respectively. The modest architecture of the halls is complemented by interiors in which market activities are organized through the placement of stalls and daylighting. The building containing the food market and the design market, also houses a restaurant, a small conference center and a creative workshop area. These programs will allow the hall to develop into an informal civic hall that complements the new formal City Administration Building located across the street.
First Prize: Europan Competition Tallinn by XML
Clearly delineated by Green Cement, the project aims to create a public space in which the Linnahall, the City Administration Building and the Market Twins become genuine actors, each with their own roles. The clear demarcation of the boundaries through the adjacent woodlands allows the site to develop into a meaningful public space, with a program that will be truly rooted in Tallinn’s urban fabric.
MADRID
In the Europan competition in Madrid, XML was awarded an honorable mention for its proposal ‘El Cementerio de la Cornisa’. The project combines a cemetery with a park, to recover one of the most emblematic sites in Madrid’s city center: the Manzanares Cornice. As an area that was peripheral to the city but also contained an influential religious center, the Cornice played a double role in Madrid’s social and cultural fabric ever since some buildings were constructed there in the 13th century.
Honorable Mention: Europan Competition Madrid by XML
The project seeks to maximize the true potential of a void within the city. As in most European cities, Madrid’s population is waning. Urban growth has come to a standstill, exacerbated by the current recession, and the median age of the city’s population has risen considerably. The proposal of XML is based on the precept that, for a site to be absorbed within the public space of a city, meaning is more important than program. Therefore, instead of reacting with the typical developers’ reflex bent on allocating a program to each and every available location within a city, this proposal aims to attribute meaning to the intrinsic qualities of the site’s emptiness.
Honorable Mention: Europan Competition Madrid by XML
Within the project, XML proposed that the Cornice’s emptiness is preserved by pursuing a program characterized by emptiness: death. The proposal transforms the site into a grid of cemeteries on various plateaus, modestly following the morphology of the landscape. Instead of solely offering programmatic filling, this proposal pushes the intrinsic quality of the Cornice site to its extreme by transforming it into a tranquil, serene park within Madrid’s highly developed urban landscape. With each burial ritual, the Madrileños incorporate part of their personal histories into the site, which becomes an invisible but indelible element of the city’s mental map over the years. The routes through the grid weave into the surrounding urban areas. In this way, the Cementerio de la Cornisa project revives the aura of the convent established here centuries ago, thus strengthening the identity of the San Francisco el Grande area within the city, allowing the site to become a unique and fundamental part of the city’s public space.
MUNICH
In its proposal for Munich, XML has aimed to provide a sensitive solution for the challenge of creating a public space on the limited tracts of prime inner city locations in Europe. The Europan site at the Herzog Wilhelm Strasse is currently an unattractive, incoherent transit zone positioned between two separate shopping areas. The heart of the location is a gaping hole that provides access to an underground parking facility. The challenge for the new development is to achieve the requested program and at the same time enlarge the public space in such a way that it gives meaning to the location as part of metropolitan Munich.
Honorable Mention: Europan Competition Munich by XML
The project proposes to accommodate the requested program in a series of buildings that fully exploit the limited space available on this location. Built on a scale that creates a dialogue with the surrounding area, each building has its own specific program: hotel, office, retail and housing. The seven low-rise towers incrementally expand from the small spaces at ground level until they meet at higher levels and go on to form a continuous roof. This roof area becomes a new public space, which the public can access by the elevators housed in the “legs†of the building. As a public meeting point, the elevated plaza can become a platform for public activities that contributes to Munich’s cultural life. With this paradoxical approach, in which the constraints of the location are considered as latent qualities, the seemingly incompatible ambitions of program and public space have been allowed to develop an unexpected symbiosis.
Honorable Mention: Europan Competition Munich by XML
Honorable Mention: Europan Competition Munich by XML
Images: XML
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