CODE: 017
ARCHITECTS: cero9 (Cristina Díaz Moreno + Efrén García Grinda)
ALIAS: 4S (Sun, Sex, Sand, Sea)
YEAR: 2002
PROJECT: Urban Conditioning: Four Simulation Chambers
LOCATION: Brugge (Belgium)
COLLABORATORS: Dries van de Velde
Brugge is a city under pressure from its frozen image and its proper consequence: tourism. The city was, in olden times, organised by the small canals, the “Reitjes”. Nowadays these waterways are considered as a merely touristic and romantic image. The project emerges as the opportunity of implanting activities and reactivating city centre, till now an old fashion and romantic european tourist destination.We propose to gradually extend the network of waterways throughout the city, short-circuiting and re-organising the whole centre. This operation, to be finished by 2020, re-affirms the historic importance of the canals in the city. Throughout the extended network are to float four different artificial pieces. Each one is conceived as a generator of pleasures, evoking the sense of warmth, the sense of touch, or even the sense of shame. By producing physical pleasures or radicalising stimuli, they generate spatial conditions based on sensitive information and energetic mechanisms.
WARM FLOATING CARPET (SAND)
Big floating heated platforms, constructed by an integrated system of UV-radiation, create hedonistic oases floating through the more private canals of the centre of Brugge. Serving as artificial beaches, relax-carpets or outdoor ballrooms, they import truly Mediterranean public spaces into the medieval city. Then, city centre is transformed into the most visited beach of Belgium. Brugge is the branch of relax, sun and mediterranean fiesta, artificially generated.
THERMAL FISHTANK (SEA)
Big thermal-fish tanks drift on the water ring around the centre and external channels. These bathing bubbles are shaped by a double wall full of tropical fishes that moves slowly. In the interior space the swimmers can dive into different density and temperature liquids where ambient is defined by heat concentration of liquids and the sensation of floating or diving between living clouds of fishes that move around. They are acclimatised by solar energy, supplied by a system integrated in the mirroring roofs. This reflecting cover is a system of solar energy absorption that permits the conditioning of inner climate.
SUITES (SEX)
Floating gardens, covered with flowers, make up the conditioned image of the medieval centre, accepting the regulations of urban beauty of Brugge. Their appearance is a combination of the commonplaces of the city: red flowers and geraniums combined inside a hydroponics structure.
Inside each structure three conditioned rooms are hidden. Three white spaces coloured by light, seamless and continuous that can be used from only one person to five people simultaneously.
These rooms are defined only through light conditions. Between their inner translucent skin and exterior cladding, shaped by a high density polystyrene shell, a system of lamps slowly changes in colour and lightness and emulates changeable light conditions of the open space.
SWEATERS (SUN)
Plastic clouds floating above the canals that absorb, generate and emit artificial warmth and light. Both the warm air and the light transform the canals and the surrounding streets in air-conditioned public atmospheres. A system of radiant pipes defines their physical limits by the heat emitted and the cloud of warm liquid drops that slowly rains from ceiling. The Sweaters are warm ambients that you can experience naked and standing up or getting down into cavities on the floor. Solar collectors placed on the exterior cladding constantly warm the water and transmit heat to the interior, through the supporting structure. A thick skin made of plastic bags filled with aerogel permits, during winter, maintaining interior ambient warmer that exterior.
