Gold Urban Planning and Urban Design · 2021
Scenic Path Along Guixeres Landscape Recovery
- A' Design Award 2021 Gold Winner in Urban Planning and Urban Design
- Awarded April 15, 2021
- CLIENT: Batlle I Roig Arquitectura
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 74,600
- Verification code 72FF29E786 · Verify this award
About Scenic Path Along Guixeres Landscape Recovery
Scenic Path Along Guixeres is a pedestrian and cycle path built on former gypsum mines in Igualada, Spain. The path forms part of a green ring planned around the city. The completed section is 800 metres long and covers 5,600 square metres. Three parallel strips shape the route. The central track of granitic sand, three metres wide, ensures continuity. The outer concrete track, 1.2 metres wide, uses luminescent aggregate for evening visibility and forms a lookout with rest areas. The inner plant ditch channels runoff and retains minor landslips.
Situated within the expanding discourse of ecological restoration and regenerative landscape practice, BATLLE I ROIG ARQUITECTURA's Scenic Path Along Guixeres Landscape Recovery emerges as an exemplary demonstration of how infrastructural intervention may facilitate both environmental healing and meaningful human engagement with recovered terrain. The work appears to document a carefully orchestrated pedestrian circulation system threading through formerly disturbed land, where the elegant serpentine geometry of the pathway creates rhythmic spatial sequences that invite ambulatory contemplation while minimizing ecological disruption to the surrounding vegetation. Technical accomplishment manifests in the sensitive material palette, the aggregate surfacing reading as appropriately modest against the verdant abundance of regenerated shrubland while maintaining sufficient visual presence to guide visitors safely through the undulating topography. The photographic documentation itself achieves notable atmospheric resonance through its capture of transitional twilight conditions, the cool ambient illumination of approaching night balanced against warm artificial lighting that suggests the pathway's continued accessibility and safety during evening hours. Compositional intelligence guides the viewer's eye along the intended circulation route, the S-curve functioning simultaneously as formal organizing principle and phenomenological preview of the embodied experience awaiting visitors. The exposed limestone outcropping visible at upper right may reference the site's geological heritage, perhaps acknowledging former extractive activities while celebrating natural processes of healing and regrowth. Thematic content engages enduring questions regarding humanity's capacity to remediate environmental damage and create new relationships with landscapes bearing histories of disturbance. The work invites viewers to consider how thoughtful design intervention might transform sites of ecological loss into places of renewed vitality and contemplative possibility, suggesting that infrastructure and restoration need not exist in opposition but may together foster deeper appreciation for landscape resilience.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- The project has two main goals: first, connectivity, achieving the continuity of this global project around the whole city (the green ring). Second, landscape and biodiversity recovery, establishing the necessary elements to generate a new dynamic on the site that will progressively improve its environmental conditions through the use of collected water. In this sense, the proposal creates a typical section with three clearly differentiated strips that adapt to the different situations of the layout, addressing the problems of the site as well as developing its potential.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- 5.600 sqm / 800 meters long
- Tags
- Landscape Recovery, Pedestrian Path, Cyclable Lane, Rest Areas, Viewpoint, Architecture Landscape, Biodiversity
- Production Technology
- The central strip, with the main 3-metre-wide granitic-sand track, guarantees the continuity of the Green Ring. The outer strip is a linear lookout overlooking the city. A 1.2-metre-wide track paved with concrete to ensure the accessibility and using luminescent aggregate to improve visibility during the evening. The layout of this linear scenic viewpoint recognises the principal existing landmarks, vegetation and trees by widening and creating rest areas. The inner strip acts as a plant ditch, to channel runoff and generates a safety strip to stop minor landslips. These same fallen rocks are used to build a sequence of retaining areas to filter and rechannel this water to new points where vegetation has been planted to colonise the place.
- Design Challenge
- The project was born and built during the crisis, for which we had a very small budget available. We were asked just to solve a new path through that location in order to ensure the continuity of the Igualada Green Ring, but the knowledge acquired about the site and its values forced us to take the whole former gypsum mines as our scope of work. We did not want to design a project of a simple path, oblivious to everything observed and its potentials. Our desire was to recover the entire area, historically abandoned, and integrate it into the green and social infrastructure of the city.
- Project Duration
- The project, located in Igualada (next to Barcelona, Spain) started in May 2017 and finished in January 2018.
- Operation Flow
- The intervention creates a landmark visible from afar (the viewpoint) that acts as a reclamation for the whole city and encourages the use of space. Also, the path is completed with a number of small living areas strategically placed on the most privileged areas. This section of the path ends in a final observation deck cantilevering over the mountain providing a panoramic view of the Anoia and Montserrat Mountain. The project has had an exceptional reception from the citizens. They flock to stroll and practice sports in their leisure time. This has motivated the municipality to go on with additional segments of the track to continue extending this Green Path around the city.
- Research
- The proposal’s innovation lies in the result of this process of analysis and synthesis that concludes with the technification of conventional solutions for path construction, in order to accomplish greater performance regarding accessibility, visibility, durability and re naturalization of the environment, with an optimum cost ratio and maximum efficiency regarding environmental footprint.
- Inspiration
- The project is framed within Igualada’s Green Ring, creating a set of pedestrian and bicycle paths as a belt around the city. This new green sustainable mobility infrastructure aims at establishing a network of free spaces, apt for environmentally friendly leisure activities, adapting and recovering, to great extent, currently underused or degraded spaces. In this context, the gypsum mines path implies the adaptation of a 1,65km section, of which 800 meters have already been accomplished.
- Image Credits
- Image #1: Photographer Jordi Surroca, Guixeres (1), 2018. Image #2: Photographer Jordi Surroca, Guixeres (2), 2018. Image #3: Photographer Jordi Surroca, Guixeres (3), 2018. Image #4: Photographer Jordi Surroca, Guixeres (4), 2018. Image #5: Photographer Jordi Surroca, Guixeres (5), 2018.
Video Credits: Stupendastic Films - Patents
- Copyrights belong to Batlle i Roig Arquitectura, 2020.