La arquitectura de las infraestructuras o la construcción de paisajes contemporáneos

 

Las infraestructuras son un conjunto de elementos, dotaciones o servicios necesarios para el funcionamiento de un país, una sociedad o una organización. Generalmente son estructuras que sirven de sustento a otras y suelen estar pensadas para resolver problemas funcionales. Su imprescindible presencia cotidiana modifica constantemente entornos, ciudades, territorios. ¿Cómo influye ese cambio en el paisaje? ¿Las infraestructuras generan nuevos espacios? ¿Es posible realizar un proyecto arquitectónico con ellas? Para responder a estas preguntas, este artículo analiza siete proyectos contemporáneos internacionales realizados en contextos donde las redes de infraestructuras tienen un papel predominante y son construidas no solo desde un punto de vista utilitario sino con una visión estética, antropológica y social. Surge una arquitectura de las infraestructuras que construye insospechados paisajes contemporáneos, espejo de la sociedad que los ha generado. Reflexionar sobre esta nueva realidad, desde la perspectiva del proyecto arquitectónico, es el objetivo de este trabajo.

A cartography of al-Andalus’ landscape:

Mapping settlements of Muslim agricultural colonization in Europe applying GIS techniques

Above: Atlas from Kitāb Ruğğār by Muḥammad al-Idrīsī (circa 1154). Below: Detail of the atlas with representation of al-Andalus and location of Segura. This map is an interpretation and transliteration realized by Konrad Miller between 1926 and 1931 in his work Mappae Arabicae. It is based on a copy dated around 1456 in Cairo, currently in the Bodleian Library of Oxford.

This paper analyses the landscape defined by rural settlements, with Hispanic Muslim remnants built in a rammed-earth technique in a valley located in the south-eastern Iberian Peninsula. The aim of this work is to describe the different anthropic points of this particular medieval landscape to contextualize them in the historical literature and then to expose, alongside the methodological innovations applied, the main behavioural patterns found in the implantation of these establishments in order to categorize and classify them. This challenge involves using procedures that enable a macrospatial reading of the territory and measurement of the influence of landscape variables. In order to achieve this goal, an original and interdisciplinary method has been designed combining archaeological, historical, and architectural techniques alongside a multicriteria analysis developed in the geographic information systems setting. The findings provide significant knowledge about the ways in which the al-Andalus’ territory was populated, how the system of rural nodes worked, and the relationships between establishments and agricultural colonization, shedding new light on the complex palimpsest of landscape.