The condition of contemporary society is struggling to find itself in common identity values condensed in a recognizable iconography. Assuming that in the contemporaneity it is an achievable goal, yet it turns to be an accumulation of dislocated and dislocating experiences. Perhaps for this very reason, it’s now a good time to reconsider the debate between nature and architecture but with new assumptions.

A usual way we move close to this idea is by wrapping things up under the term ‘sustainability’, which deals with this entire issue in a lot of fragments. Eventually leaving an unsatisfied the need for an architecture that homogeneously condenses a theme that is not only technological, nor exclusively formal or typological. Instead of an ethical and structural connection between humans and society with nature, and a huge opportunity of how architecture be an element of mediation between them.

Challenge

The competition brief is to design an archaeological park in the Mines of Rio Tinto Spain.
The aim of this competition is to go far beyond a simple, even if necessary, use of nature as a product, but wants to push the architectural experimentation through a process of hybridization of two. In usual architecture discourse, they are apparently different bodies and two different languages how can we merge boundaries between both?

Objective

How can architecture manifest itself like a human body where the architectural spaces can be understood as an extension of it? How can the structure of the territory itself with the corresponding morphological and topographical variations be fused with the nature it is surrounded with?

Prizes

Prize pool of worth 18,000$
First Prize: 5000$ (For students and professionals)
Runner Up: 6 x 1000$ (For students and professionals)
People’s Choice: 4 x 400$ (Open for all)
Honorable Mention: 12 x 450$ Each