Madrid Río wins 2015 Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design. Madrid, Spain.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to announce that the 12th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design has been awarded to Madrid Río, a new linear park in Madrid designed by a team led by Ginés Garrido of Burgos & Garrido, including Porras & La Casta, Rubio & Álvarez-Sala, and West 8. The three Madrid architecture studios and the Rotterdam-based landscape architecture firm will share the prize’s $50,000 purse.
The City of Madrid reclaimed the banks of the Manzanares River by depressing a large segment of the inner ring road, the M-30, built in the 1970s and severing whole sections of the city from each other. The result of surfacing nearly 30 kilometers of tunnels is the creation of 120 hectares of new public space, which encompasses dozens of sports areas (tennis and basketball courts, soccer fields, fitness areas, rock climbing center, skate park), greenswards, plazas, cafes and restaurants, an orchard, an urban beach, children’s play areas, plus 30 kilometers of cycling paths, and 11 new footbridges. The project also prompted the restoration of five historic dams and two historic bridges (the Puente de Segovia and Puente de Toledo), as well as the refurbishment of highway bridges and the recuperation of the areas surrounding these infrastructural works. With these new river crossings and the incorporation of existing historic features into the new park plan, Madrid Río has strengthened surrounding neighborhoods’ connection to the new amenities and to each other.
The project won an international competition in 2005, and construction was phased so that the public could enjoy it starting in 2011; the park was fully completed earlier this year. “The decision to award Madrid Río the Green Prize in Urban Design was motivated by the jury’s desire to highlight the potential for thoughtfully planned and carefully executed mobility infrastructures to transform a city and its region,” commented jury chair Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning at Harvard GSD. “The extent to which the project harnesses the deployment of new infrastructures as an opportunity to repair and regenerate the city through carefully articulated design interventions is particularly valuable within the context of contemporary urbanization globally.”
An exhibition on the winning project will be on view at the GSD’s Gund Hall gallery from January 18 to March 6, 2016. The awards ceremony will be held at the GSD on February 2, at which prize jury chair Mehrotra will lead a discussion and presentation.
+info: HERE
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