PARQUE LIQUIDO. A proposal for the Cuernavaca Linear Park Competition. Mexico City
Parque Líquido is a proposal that brings in to definition a new profile of architect who acts as social and environmental mediator. The preoccupations of the context for which we work has made self-referential and self-absorbed architecture obsolete. The project will be limited to providing the tools for the community, who in turn will participate to give it its final form.
Parque Líquido is a political and social project that, through the financing, construction and collective management of resources, reinforces the idea of the communal as the most effective way of involving each individual with the human collective context to which he belongs.
Parque Líquido is also an economic project that refuses demolition by recycling the infrastructures of the past to adapt them to new needs. The city thus transforms its infrastructures in the same way that it does with its fabrics, overlapping them without erasing them and thus maintaining its historical memory.
To this end, we propose a reinforcement of the railway infrastructure as a support for a diverse and flexible program. Train wagons will host micro-programs with the ability to travel throughout the park depending on fluctuating demand and the needs of different communities on a daily, weekly, seasonal or annual basis. The micro character of the train car as a basic unit of urban intervention facilitates diverse financing capable of collecting private funds through corporate or collective sponsorship (crowdfunding).
The intensification of the railway infrastructure along the park demands a reinforcement of this alternative axis of the city that faces the crossings with the great avenues, turning the intersections into true spaces of shared multimodal transit. Using the railway easement as a potential urban connective tissue, there will be pedestrian and bicycle paths and the in-between spaces within the entanglement of the networks will allow a water landscape capable of providing ecosystem services.
The railway structure allows the superposition with a new micro topography of ponds and mounds that accommodate the infrastructure of retention, natural purification, and filtration of rainwater. The landscape of the park is built around the ecology associated with these wet spaces and their changing character. The presence and enjoyment of water in the collective space contributes to building a new social awareness about its management and use.
We must recognize that these intentions are tributaries of a line of thought concerned with human habitat as the definitive act of the architectural event and its true shaping force. This generates a conflictive degree of indeterminacy that clashes with the inertia of the modern architect as a master mind who is only capable of forming a new world, obviating the existing one. This conflict remained latent since the dissolution of the CIAM and was potent enough to undermine such extraordinarily visionary projects as the Fun Palace and the Potteries Thinkbelt by Cedric Price.
We are resolutely recalling Price’s steps to understand that this indetermination is the inevitable door to the socio-political reconciliation of the figure of the architect and an infinite universe of possibilities that the community brings.
Project Team: David Marroquin, Tanzil Shafique and Paco Mejias
