Recession induced freezing of construction in the Spanish capital has created a number of unplanned urban voids. The team found one of those voids next to the M30 ring-road junction with A1 motorway. The site was meant for the CICCM, a giant exhibition, auditoria and congress space whose parking areas will be the only part of it to be built. This site was considered to be perfect for the development of a so called program driven thermodynamic micro-urbanism. A set of architectural objects able to implement innovation in the fields of energy, arts and business. This micro-city has been called REACCITY, for short.
The name of the project refers to the Reactable. Developed at the Universitat Ramón Llull, Barcelona, Reactable is an electronic musical instrument featuring a sensitive table and a set of pieces which, when moved over the table produce sounds. The characteristics of these sounds depend on the position of a piece on the table and its relative position to other pieces. This model is taken at a bigger scale as a base for our parametric urban design. We will be playing with 5 hyper-specific programmes: solar energy collection, vehicle exchanger, housing, open program and establizers. All of them change, grow, densify or disperse according to a series of parameters featuring on-site collected physical data, social dynamics or building regulations.
A surrounding topography, access routes and paths create an infrastructure which is used as motherboard of the whole system. As it happens with the Reactable, the position of the first element starts a rhythm: the solar energy collector holds a set of photovoltaic panels with a structure defined by the shaded site area of the panels themselves. That energy will be used in the vehicle exchanger in order to charge electric car batteries whilst the building’s earth-made thick skin releases oxygen in the environment. This skin holds the vehicles heat and is able to grow thicker in order to hold a larger number of plants, contributing to the overall air quality. The number of housing units depend on the number of cars in the system, and are devoted both for people using the vehicle exchangers and people working in the existing office towers or the open program that links to them.
The whole project is conceived as a live and changing organism. The REACCITY is able to work as an optimised urban system based on the collaboration of different programs featured in the system, generating a complex and dynamic environment. The control of this environment is through a set of parameters which act like filters or samplers, giving the city its rhythm.