Réactiver, Stratigraphier, Naturer Valencia. Book
2015
INFORMATION
A book of research published by ESAAA’s DSRA collection, this book is the result of a study of the city of Valencia, offering an original re-reading of the Ciutat Vella through the prism of Patrick Geddes, a precursor of urban planning and urban ecology. What would Geddes have proposed for the centre of Valencia, full of wastelands in 2014, 100 years after his proposals in India? This is the premise of this survey, which also includes various audiovisual, artistic and cartographic proposals.
His position between disciplines, using them in turn in an idiosyncratic order in the service of the urban project, makes this work a valuable object both for the method he uses and which he developed as part of the DSRA in Annecy (Adrián Torres Astaburuaga has been an accomplice in what the Design & Space department at ESAAA has been inventing collectively for some years), and for the terrain he explores: The city of Valencia, plagued by the Spanish crisis, has become a field for aesthetic and political urban experimentation thanks to the actions of a few people, including Adrián Torres Astaburuaga.
In the foreword to this large-format book created by graphic designers Camille Garnier and Alex Paraboschi, architect and urban planner Nicolas Tixier recounts his first visit to Valencia: ‘Adrián Torres Astaburuaga, narrator of a rediscovered urban morphology and a committed architect, was already proposing a radical reading of Valencia and a re-use of the work of Patrick Geddes, a precursor of urban ecology. Without yet stating it, his account already interwove a notional triptych of urban stratigraphy, natural memory and reactivation through use, and drew for us a new Valencia, attentive to what was already there and inventive in an economy in crisis. Five years after that first meeting, the projects and exchanges have continued. What was a real lesson for us in situ is now a work of art.
Technical data
Authors: Adrián Torres Astaburuaga, Nicolas Tixier (contribution 2nd chapter)
Coordination: Didier Tallagrand, Nicolas Tixier.
Publisher:ESAAA editions. Collection DSRA
Re-reading: Emmanuelle Graffin
Director of publications: Stéphane Sauzadde.
ISBN 979-10-91505-13-0
Legal deposit July 2015
Printer: Manufacture de Deux-Ponts.
Distribution: les presses du réel. www.lespressesdureel.com
Graphic design:: Camille Garnier, Alex Paraboschi
This edition was made possible thanks to the DSRA (Higher Diploma in Art Research) and the cross-border laboratory ‘ÉCHOS-ESAAA,MAMCO’, a partnership between the ESAAA (Annecy Alpes School of Art) and the MAMCO (Geneva Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) with the support of the European Union.