Casa de Campo, Madrid’s Field of Play, has yet to fully integrate into the city's everyday life and ecology. This forest, rich in archaeological and natural heritage, is nearly forgotten, with its playgrounds sitting empty and unused. This project takes an infrastructural approach, creating directed fields where both human and non-human activities can unfold. The design lays the groundwork for future events and building activities, operating flexibly in the division, allocation, and construction of surfaces, while also engaging architecture's ability to communicate through its imagery.
The research identified multiple sites within Casa de Campo to become a series of interconnected yet diffuse elements. These elements are intended to induce movement, create new atmospheres, and establish visual connections and ecologies between the park and the city. Site selection was based on factors such as accessibility, proximity to roads and trails, viewpoints, and archaeological significance. The networked imagery of these architectural elements fosters new associations and movement patterns between city dwellers and their playground, Casa de Campo.
Key research methods included mapping, drawing, navigation, and walking, all of which helped to immerse the project within the context of Casa de Campo and Madrid. These tools revealed the site's suppressed and intangible qualities. Some maps were playful and internal, while others were systematic, helping to address the complex implications of the proposed intervention. Operational mapping, used as a design tool, allowed for the exploration of functions and possible outcomes over an extended time frame. This approach balanced structured, fixed elements with more flexible, negotiable ones. As a result, the urban strategy aims to create a flexible system rooted in ecological and infrastructural thinking. Time and process are integral to the landscape's growth and microbial activity, connecting air, surfaces, substrates, and rhizomes. The architectural design materializes these anticipated event scenarios, and the construction process is made visible to the public, embracing the messy realities of urban building rather than concealing them.
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This thesis investigates the intersections of architecture, control, and the leisure economy in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), focusing on how leisure spaces like the SEZ (Sports- und Erholungszentrum) were designed to manage and script everyday life of East Berlin in the latter decade of the communist regime in Germany. Using a conceptual framework of themed design and experience architecture, it explores how public spaces were spatialised to control the population, with narrative design and visual techniques for enticing large scale participation in state-sanctioned relaxation and leisure in a surveilled environment. The study examines how GDR architects adapted international trends in leisure design to fit socialist political goals, institutionalising leisure as a tool of control over free time. It also considers the evolving role of leisure spaces since reunification, where control has shifted from totalitarian domination to more complex negotiations between the state and citizens.
Archival research traces the cultural, political, and architectural motivations behind these designs, highlighting the multivalent nature of leisure architecture, even in totalitarian regimes. The thesis also discusses the impacts that economic restructuring in Germany after 1990 had on GDR owned buildings such as SEZ, urban voids and Zwischennutzung. Sources include materials from the Bundesarchiv in Berlin and the Friedrichshian-Kreuzberg Archiv. ... Read more