Les Portes de Collserola in Barcelona

April, 2012
Regeneration of Les Portes de Collserola. “Follow the Yellow Brick Road”

The aim of the competition was to rethink the area of Les Portes de Collserola (Collserola’s Gates) a vast strip of land between the city of Barcelona and the natural park of Collserola.
Our proposal entitled “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” tries to reinvent the relation between Nature and City based on the appreciation of the temporary and the imperfect.
To Recognize Beauty in the Imperfect; to imagine a Special Place in the ordinary.
Sometimes a mark or a scar gives a special characterization to a face. Our area -Vallvidrera / Les Planes- is characterized by heavy infrastructures that run through the Collserola Park from North to South. The lines of the highway, the road, the train … only come together and dance together in our area. As a painting they characterize the area which becomes recognizable from Google Earth. This hybrid condition: natural on the one hand but loaded with infrastructure on the other, generates a new condition, a third space, with its own singular language.
The project develops a “Decalogue” of intervention principles for the site:
I_ Naturalize and Ruralize. Program Follows Nature.
II_Recovering instead of Adding.
III_Connect Physically and Mentally.
IV_ Intelligent Participation vs ‘Placebo’ Participation
V_Creation of Catalysts.
VI_Respect for the Existing: If It Works, it will not be modified.
VII_From Road to Civic Axe
VIII_For Everyone
IX_Curiosity and Imagination
X_Integrate the conflict

Complete information of the project here

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Title: Follow the Yellow Brick Road…
Project name: Les Portes de Collserola. Porta Les Planes (4b)
Date: April 2012
Type: Open International Competition in two phases
Competition Organizer: Barcelona City Hall
Number of participants: 1^st phase: 3.348; 2^nd phase 7 teams per site
Ranking: –
Location: Barcelona, Spain.
Site: Vallvidrera-Les Planes, Barcelona.
Programme: Urban and landscape regeneration and intervention proposal for the area of Les Planes of the Natural park of Collserola
Surface: 400 000 m²
Status: competition
Client: BIMSA. City of Barcelona.
Budget: N/A
Awards: –
Publications: –
Exhibitions: BIMSA
STAR Team: Beatriz Ramo, Oscar Gential, Beatriz González Lazo and  Ahinitze Errasti.
Collaborators/Consulting: emG (Arnau Boix i Pla,  Paco Casanova Meseguer) and SUC arquitectes (Rosella Chiner i Mateu, Lara Llop i Font). Collaborators: Marc Recha i Batallé (cinema director), Antonio Peralta Morales (anthropologist), Ana Elisa Neto (landscape architect), Guillem Molina Vacas (biologist), Josep Enric García Alemany (civil engineer), Elisa Bermejo Navarro (surveyor), Francesc Arechavala Roé (geographer) and Pablo García García (ambientologo).
Extra: –