Golf!
How to imagine a city in a time when it seems defeated by the suburban lawn?
In the zenith of the anti-urban real-estate bubble the golf course is the omnipresent tyrant. Is there any urbanity left in the suburban dreams of this social-democratic consensus? While the kids of the Spanish democratic transition invest in turf and the architectural profession disregards golf’s banal success, we have to say WE LIKE GOLF COURSES! Not because the ecological collapse, the domesticated landscape, or the lack of sociability they promote. Rather because of the virus of utopianism, the hybridization of natural and artificial and the generic impunity implicit in their emptiness. La Laguna, an island of urbanity in the suburban ocean is the ideal laboratory to redefine the golf as a model European urbanity. This is a ten point manifesto for Golf urbanity: 1 It is neither natural nor artificial, but rather a grass/asphalt gradient. 2 It is shaped funnel-like, granting the sustainable autonomy of energy-suckers cone-shaped environments. 3 It turns suburban hierarchies inside-out forcing back lawns out of the closet. 4 It drags golf constituencies in social activators of ecologic management. 5 It is a menagerie public activities and private sports that requires collective management. 6 It is full of hyperminimun quadruplex units, beautiful nightmares of 40 to 60m2. 7 It has cars instead of pets. 8 Its upside-down gardens welcome the street all the way to the living spaces. 9 It always grows vertically. 10 It takes advantage of the vast range 3m width typologies.
Project: Golf!, Entry for Europan 9
Status: Competition, Honorable Mention
Client: Europan 9
Location: La Laguna, canary Islands, Spain
Program: Urban planing and housing
