A New Mineral Kingdom: Masterplan for Cala Advocat, Alicante [Competition]
Together with landscape architects Seth Denizen and Tat Bonvehí Rosich
( Thinking Through Soil )
Collaborators: Irene Domínguez, Pablo Cevallos-Zúñiga
Renders: BrumeLab (Manuel Belso)
In what time do we live? In what geological epoch do we find ourselves? In our proposal A New Mineral Kingdom, we take the current climate crisis as an invitation to pause on this question: when are we? On what timeline do we find ourselves when we stand on the site of this proposal?
This is a question that is always implicit whenever we decide to design with climate change in mind. Every object of design contains within itself a conceptual model of the climate that is based on a simple assumption: the past is, more or less, our template for what will continue to happen in the future. If climate change is anything, it is a name for what happens when that assumption fails, and today it is failing more than ever. This represents a crisis for design, and this is the crisis our proposal seeks to respond to.
*El Cantalar* cliff is in beautiful Benissa, on a Mediterranean coastline that has become an iconic image of “the good life” for millions of people around the world. Its white sandy beaches and gentle seas form an essential part of this image, but in the era of climate change, it is no longer possible to design and build a beach. Sand is the most mined mineral on earth, and the second most consumed natural resource after water. The fantasy of its permanence in relation to rising sea levels is becoming increasingly expensive to subsidize, and it is precisely this image that we have abandoned in our proposal. Instead, we begin by understanding the temporality of our beach in Benissa. Sand represents a moment in geological time in the passage of silica from unweathered rock to the mineral terminus of phyllosilicate clay. In Benissa, the sand produced by the weathering of its rocky coastal shelf is continually swept away by the strong currents produced by the Mediterranean’s merger with the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, the site is characterized by eroded rock material that is too heavy to be swept away, but deeply weathered and textured by its exposure to the warm Mediterranean climate.
Our project finds its ‘time’ in this moment between rock and sand, where the textures and contours of the coastline take shape. We propose to reuse this rocky material on-site to intensify this texture, suggesting new ways of fully inhabiting the geological moment we find ourselves in. In this project, the goal is to imagine new forms of inhabitation that are appropriate to this geological moment, rather than replacing the coastline with forms that are more familiar. By taking the erosion of rock as our architectural typology, we find new possibilities for intensifying our capacity to experience and relate to the non-human temporalities that we find ourselves subject to in this changing world, the New Mineral Kingdom.
