107 – JS2002 – PRÁCTICA ARQUITECTURA Y URBANISMO SLP + BEROS ABDUL ARHITECȚI ASOCIAȚI SRL
Main authors: Jaime Daroca, José Mayoral, José Ramón Sierra, Esenghiul Abdul, Christian Beros
Architecture collaborators: Ruxandra Sandulescu, Raluca Grecea, Joel Salamero, Ines Cacciolato, Josefina Joo Lee, Pablo Sanfuentes, Anghel Alessia Andreea, Pănescu Daria-Petruța, Trotea Teodora, Zigu Andreea-Mihaela, Costan Svinti
Specialty collaborators: Kelvin Ho (Renderings), Osvaldo Moreno (landscape consultant)
Country or countries of origin: Spaina, Romania
OAR Territorial branch: București
” The jury primarily appreciated the rhythm of nodes urban connections, both along the river and canal, and also across the city, with the potential to define a new identity for a new district through landscape interventions. The project considers the multiple ways to plug ecological intelligence into the city. The site-wide attention to the ecological connectivity and spatial qualities would greatly enhance habitat potential.
Clear investigation into the application and self-sustaining ecological processes that will lead to greater biodiversity. The hippodrome included diverse ecological character. The jury appreciated the systematic de-paving scheme for the stormwater management.
The systems of urban connections were inventive and well-detailed, with a core spine and points of interest that would increase social interaction and accessibility to the green corridor. The jury recognizes the potential to start a self-sustaining ecosystem, but it could be difficult for the city to maintain the novel patches, such as “rhizo-filtration”. Implementing, maintaining, and protecting these patches would require highly-trained staff.” – appreciation of the Jury
The river remembers
Restoring the hydrological memory of Târgu Mureș
Târgu Mureș is a city that has spent a century forgetting its river. The Mureș flows through it, beside it, and under it; channeled, embanked, and drained underground. Each generation’s engineers solved the problem of water with the tools available to them: concrete, straight lines, and canalization. Each one of them leaving remnants of an industrial past in which water was made to work, not made to live.
Today, considering the challenges of a postindustrial city, and the urgent need to respond to extreme weather events, cities are looking back to forgotten water realms. Places of a city that are so close but so far and anonymous for its own citizens.
Beneath the concrete of the Turbinei, the meander geometry of the original Mureș arm persists. In the compacted grounds of the Hippodrome, the soil retains its capacity to absorb. Along the embankments of the river, the floodplain forest that once ran the full length of the valley has disappeared, but in the municipality park is present as a latent ecological memory, ready to flourish if given the conditions.
The aim of our project is not to invent a new landscape. But to remove the obstacles that prevent the existing one from re-emerging. Therefore, the need to realize an act of restoration.
We understand the three sites not as separate objects, but as a complex landscape, three moments in a single water journey, each one playing a distinct hydrological and programmatic role. We propose the urban reintegration of these sites acting as ecological organs rather than simple infrastructure, reconnecting the three sites as an integral part of a larger territory.
Preexistences and traces
Our proposal starts by unrevealing and recovering the pre-existence conditions of the site. Recovering the memory of Targu Mures as a place of encounter of different civilizations. An open urban market where travelers from all over Europe and Asia met to trade. Understanding the remnants of a modern industrial city, the identity of large socialist interventions, and the current state of open vague terrains. Each period has left its own traces on the territory, its own landmarks which are meant to be recognized and reused. The identity of the place remains in those urban traces.
The river’s territory
Through its course and from the Carpathian mountains, the Mures river connects a series of landscapes. From gorges flanked by conifers and beech forest, to riverbanks aligned with galleries of willows and poplars, until the floodplains with seasonal wetlands and meadows with a great biodiversity. These are the landscapes which we would like to evoke, to recover, and to give a new meaning. Bringing back the riparian forests, reconnecting the native networks of biological corridors, and enhancing biodiversity and resilience.
At city level, we aim to treat water as an articulation rather than a border. A new city connector between Targu Mures, Sancraiu de Mures and Podeni. The river itself has the potential to become a river park. Both shores are considered in the proposal, thinking in a longer-term future project, where natural processes and natural systems flow over planning zones. Working in the river banks we can establish the conditions for an ecological development of its borders, including elements sized and positioned to remain useful across different ecological and social scenarios, avoiding over-specification.
At a neighborhood level, we propose new connections on Turbinei canal, creating spaces to connect people between them and with their natural environment. New bridges and platforms which can act as ‘urban rooms’, places as landmarks and meeting points for informal activities. The Mures and the canal becomes a gathering point.
The river, from city border to central articulation.
The Mures river park sits in the center of the valley. Today the river acts as the city border. Due to the expansion limit to the SE hills the city has developed towards the NW, crossing over the river. The river park is proposed as an articulation between the current city and its on going urban expansion. The water bodies become an ecological bridge between the present and the future.
Water as a living landscape
We look for a project which can open landscape infrastructures to the public, giving value to the different processes and systems, where water can become an educational tool.
To alleviate future weather events the 3 objectives can become a network of absorption – filtration – storage, and slow discharge of water excess, helping to prevent overflooding.
Water from the adjacent streets at Turbinei canal can be guided to open bioswales to absorve, conduct and naturally filtrate the water. Then, it can be stored in tanks to slowly discharge it into the canal. Further down, the municipality park green permeable areas, and permeable pavings can absorve the rain fall, which can also be collected from the public building roofs, and sports areas to be slowly discharged or stored for irrigation.
The hippodrome park can become the largest filtration area in the system, natural filtration ponds can collect water excess and clean it up naturally before running into the meander. The large meadows are slightly depressed to be able to retain and absorve excess of rainfall during critical events, recharging the underground aquifer, guiding the excess to the meander, and reducing the risks of overflowing streets and sewage networks.
The Meander is maintained without much interference with its current state. Water from the canal and from the hippodrome will flow through a sequence of natural filtration systems at the upper river system, cascading down and following the natural Mures direction. Re-filling the natural biotope and slowly discharging back to the natural course of the river. The Meander will be kept as a symbol of what once was, and what the future of the project should be.
Atmosphere
We aim for a project which recognize the contradictory atmospheres of the post-industrial city, transforming the inherent identity into relative narratives and experiences. A new green corridor is proposed connecting all the 3 sites, running together with the water course creating a single green and blue axis for Targu Mures. Connecting dispair urban fabrics, from the open fields of the hippodrome, to small scale housing units along the river, passing by remnants of storage fields and military barracks into dense socialist building complexes.
Large tree canopies will allow a larger evapotranspiration effect, cooling down the paths, creating shade during the summer, and making space for new habitats to bring back birds and insects into a system which can grow in complexity through the next decades.
Open frameworks
Rather than overprogramming the site, we opt for an open framework for ecological development. A process where succession, adaptation, disturbance, and recovery are built into the logic of the project itself, using landscape as a tool to regenerate and reincorporate natural processes lost by decades of urbanization.
