A couple of weeks ago we mentioned here that Juan Goñi, architect at Klicstudio, was off to Nanjing University in China. He spent ten days there as a visiting professor on a workshop run by the university’s School of Architecture, with the Manzana Verde Málaga brief on the table.
The exercise was a stripped-back version of the brief for the Manzana Verde de Málaga — literally, Málaga’s green block — a competition here in the city for a residential block planned around sustainability and energy efficiency. Entries had closed less than a month earlier, so the subject was still very much live. The point of taking it to China was to see what a group of students would do with it: people with no first-hand knowledge of Málaga, and therefore none of the assumptions that come with it, working from sustainability and energy efficiency as first principles.
The students, all in the first year of their architecture master’s, worked on an area of 94,000 m² for 963 dwellings plus infrastructure and green space. Each took on one of the 16 plots the block is divided into: four perimeter housing buildings and eight internal ones, three for community facilities, and the public space. Nineteen students in all — the buildings developed individually, the public space by a group of four. The standard was good across the board, and better still given how little time they had. As the images show, they combined passive strategies for sun, wind and rain, “circular” spaces where food is produced and waste is handled, and communal areas for people to meet.
None of this is exotic to a student in China. The pace at which their cities grow means they live with techniques for reducing human impact on the environment as a matter of course, not as an extra.
A selection of the work went into the workshop brochure. Some of it is below.
