The project of a railway station in Granada, which last January obtained a first-class mark, contains in its proposal, which has been presented with in great detail with planimetries and models, 12,100 square metres for the station centre, parkings that take up 32,000 square metres, 6,500 sm of offices and other surfaces devoted to facilities, shopping areas, halls, lobbies, accesses, coffee shops, restaurants, etc.
The author of the project, Carmen Navas-Parejo, has taken into account the fact that the urban growth has favoured the “absorption” of the station by the city. Such absorption has determined a series of relations with the adjacent borders to the station and its environment. The situation of the tracks, inserted in the built-up area, has caused an interruption of all the system of communications between neighbourhoods and streets. The railway route has been configured as well as an empty space where these autonomous “islands” attach, separated from the functioning of the city: university installations (Campus de Fuentenueva, paseíllos and sports complex); Estadio de la Juventud, carbonería, military installations, neighbourhood of Los Pajaritos and even a parcel of the vega that remains in the road branch. Cut-off spaces that Navas-Parejo´s project will join.
Such islands will lose their significance and connection as track excavations and the visual, but not physical, disappearance of the train start. This is the starting point for thecreation of the new Railway Station for the AVE. It is a meeting area more than a building. Station physical space, a place of entrance and exit for trains and passengers, spreads in the environment becoming a confluence and social interaction area for people and spaces with a unifying element: green, the park where the whole project is included. A station, according to Navas-Parejo, that acts as a virus: polluting the different areas, it has become a big park that, “as a Garden of Earthly Delight”, has been created to incorporate all thepre-existent islands for passers-by´s enjoyement.
According to the author of the project, Carmen Navas- Parejo, the station or artificial park can not be understood as a cut-off building, but as “an event within such garden, designing a new landscape” that opens out onto striking city views: the Alhambra, Sierra Nevada and the Albayzín. The project, Navas-Parejo points out, is not “product of the context but a diologue with it”; it wants to be, on the one hand, an arrival place in a forest, where the sky filters until the lowest levels, cut out by artificial trees. It also acts as a soil releaser, from the use of its roofs as public space. The station includes a bridge over the tracks that connects city areas –the neighbourhood of los Pajaritos and Campus de Fuentenueva- that were unconnected; it incorporates a covered shopping street, where premises open in and outside, with an independent functioning of the station.
Further information: Carmen Navas Parejo
Higher Technical School of Architecture
University of Granada
E-mail: littlecarmen2000@hotmail.com
