- Site-specific cases
A few months ago, we whitnessed how petroleum, modern society’s big treasure, reached its lowest value in History. Nevertheless, it was by this unexpected event that added to the surrealistic crisis of 2020’s that we could finally see the world breathe, evidencing the need to imagine new lives for black gold’s temples: refineries.
We rethink the installations of these metallic cities to turn them into sustainable palaces, letting Nature regain what it lost. The machinery is swallowed as a sign of amnesty inside this obsolete universe with expired relevance, metallic relics of a past to forget that become a canvas for those who want to imagine the new reality.
The building, that stans as a perfect geometry, becomes the physical and semantic border between two worlds. First we have the outside that belongs to the refinery, where the abandoned installations are exposed to the voracious sorrounding Nature that finally recovers what it lost. By the other hand, the interior holds all of the interventions purelly artificial: interventions done and fabricated by the Human Being
This new milestone for the city of will not only include office space and laboratories dedicated to the research for sustainable futures, but also a residential area - facing the ocean - on the west side of the complex, and other areas on the north part of the geometry that will hold museums, workshops, restaurants and many other spaces that will fill the needs of this new urban center.
The loudest part of this project is the embrace of the ruin on the outside. The only thing recognisible inside the refinery is a forest that devours its once fundamental machinery; a jungle whose remains are the skeletons of a past to forget. The devices let themselves be swallowed up as a sign of amnesty, a metallic universe that was once crucial but has become ridiculously obsolete. A dreamlike labyrinth that reminds us of the uncertainty and fragility of what we believed ethernal.
As the industrial city is being transformed into a wild ruin, the inside space of our geometry becomes a domesticated courtyard, where silos and gas spheres suffer the explicit intervention of the human hand. These metallic sculptures grow from their original structure into countless shapes and constructions that serve the main building in its main functions as they ensure the visual and spatial delight of those who just wander through the patio.
