Scenic Path Along Guixeres Landscape Recovery by Batlle i Roig Arquitectura is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2021 Golden A' Design Award in Urban Planning and Urban Design Competition Category.
GoldUrban Planning· 2021
Scenic Path Along Guixeres Landscape Recovery
Client: Batlle I Roig Arquitectura
Golden A' Design Award Winner in Urban Planning Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #118334The Design
About Scenic Path Along Guixeres Landscape Recovery
Scenic Path Along Guixeres is a pedestrian and cycle path built on former gypsum mines in Igualada, Spain. The path forms part of a green ring planned around the city. The completed section is 800 metres long and covers 5,600 square metres. Three parallel strips shape the route. The central track of granitic sand, three metres wide, ensures continuity. The outer concrete track, 1.2 metres wide, uses luminescent aggregate for evening visibility and forms a lookout with rest areas. The inner plant ditch channels runoff and retains minor landslips.
The Recognition
About the Golden A' Design Award
Scenic Path Along Guixeres Landscape Recovery is a Golden A' Design Award winner, an immensely prestigious recognition granted to first-rate, marvelous, and outstanding designs. Golden winners are exceedingly innovative, visionary, and glamorously dazzling creations that reflect the prodigy, wisdom, and prowess of their designers. Scenic Path Along Guixeres Landscape Recovery is expected to be a highly praised, trendsetting, and monumental invention that delivers unprecedented value. This Golden A' Design Award-winning design is a spectacular, respected project that highly benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Scenic Path Along Guixeres Landscape Recovery creates intense feelings of desire, evokes passion, encourages creativity, and fascinates us.
Where to Get It
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Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- The project has two main goals: first, connectivity, achieving the continuity of this global project around the whole city (the green ring). Second, landscape and biodiversity recovery, establishing the necessary elements to generate a new dynamic on the site that will progressively improve its environmental conditions through the use of collected water. In this sense, the proposal creates a typical section with three clearly differentiated strips that adapt to the different situations of the layout, addressing the problems of the site as well as developing its potential.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- 5.600 sqm / 800 meters long
- Tags
- Landscape Recovery, Pedestrian Path, Cyclable Lane, Rest Areas, Viewpoint, Architecture Landscape, Biodiversity
- Production Technology
- The central strip, with the main 3-metre-wide granitic-sand track, guarantees the continuity of the Green Ring. The outer strip is a linear lookout overlooking the city. A 1.2-metre-wide track paved with concrete to ensure the accessibility and using luminescent aggregate to improve visibility during the evening. The layout of this linear scenic viewpoint recognises the principal existing landmarks, vegetation and trees by widening and creating rest areas. The inner strip acts as a plant ditch, to channel runoff and generates a safety strip to stop minor landslips. These same fallen rocks are used to build a sequence of retaining areas to filter and rechannel this water to new points where vegetation has been planted to colonise the place.
- Design Challenge
- The project was born and built during the crisis, for which we had a very small budget available. We were asked just to solve a new path through that location in order to ensure the continuity of the Igualada Green Ring, but the knowledge acquired about the site and its values forced us to take the whole former gypsum mines as our scope of work. We did not want to design a project of a simple path, oblivious to everything observed and its potentials. Our desire was to recover the entire area, historically abandoned, and integrate it into the green and social infrastructure of the city.
- Research
- The proposal’s innovation lies in the result of this process of analysis and synthesis that concludes with the technification of conventional solutions for path construction, in order to accomplish greater performance regarding accessibility, visibility, durability and re naturalization of the environment, with an optimum cost ratio and maximum efficiency regarding environmental footprint.
- Inspiration
- The project is framed within Igualada’s Green Ring, creating a set of pedestrian and bicycle paths as a belt around the city. This new green sustainable mobility infrastructure aims at establishing a network of free spaces, apt for environmentally friendly leisure activities, adapting and recovering, to great extent, currently underused or degraded spaces. In this context, the gypsum mines path implies the adaptation of a 1,65km section, of which 800 meters have already been accomplished.
- Project Duration
- The project, located in Igualada (next to Barcelona, Spain) started in May 2017 and finished in January 2018.
- Operation Flow
- The intervention creates a landmark visible from afar (the viewpoint) that acts as a reclamation for the whole city and encourages the use of space. Also, the path is completed with a number of small living areas strategically placed on the most privileged areas. This section of the path ends in a final observation deck cantilevering over the mountain providing a panoramic view of the Anoia and Montserrat Mountain. The project has had an exceptional reception from the citizens. They flock to stroll and practice sports in their leisure time. This has motivated the municipality to go on with additional segments of the track to continue extending this Green Path around the city.
- Patents
- Copyrights belong to Batlle i Roig Arquitectura, 2020.
- Team Members
- Architect: Enric Batlle
Architect: Joan Roig
Architect: Ivan Sanchez
Architect: Mario Súñer
Architect & Landscape Architect: Livia Valentini
Agriculture Engineer & Landscape Designer: Dolors Feu
Agricultural Engineer & Environmentalist: Yago Cavaller
Building Engineer & Landscape Designer: Diana Calico - Image Credits
- Image #1: Photographer Jordi Surroca, Guixeres (1), 2018. Image #2: Photographer Jordi Surroca, Guixeres (2), 2018. Image #3: Photographer Jordi Surroca, Guixeres (3), 2018. Image #4: Photographer Jordi Surroca, Guixeres (4), 2018. Image #5: Photographer Jordi Surroca, Guixeres (5), 2018.
Video Credits: Stupendastic Films
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