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The road - The apartment

Part 2 Project 1999
Kristine Strøm-Gundersen
London Metropolitan University | UK
site/brief: Tenerife, to design a road as an infrastructural element allowing for the development of a raw shell.
Working on the scale of the surroundings, I have explored the continuation and recognition of the local vernacular system of agriculture, situating the development to respond and re-evaluate the socio-economical growth of the island.
Tenerife distinguishes itself through a terraced system of agriculture, which steps down the hills to create the rhythm of the context and determines the irrigation and drainage through their construction. Through the development and reappraisal of this, my proposal aims at investigating the possibility of creating a deck, an artificial level poised between the agricultural and urban, expressing a form generated through the contrast between the two.
This becomes an irrigated hard landscape for possible deomestic cultivation, through the treatement of water collection and dispersal rather than simple drainage. The decks further emphasise the striated nature of the hillside through the contrast between the horizontallity of the deck and the ground they occupy, strengthened by the construction of concretet pile foundation and 'free-form' suspended timber structure, allowing the ground to flow freely underneath. The development itself proposes a series of apartments concentrated round courtyards, into which all movement occurs from the deck above.

Kristine Strøm-Gundersen


the landscape, the road, and the apartment

Kristine Støm-Gundersen has achieved an elegant and accomplished project intimately involved with the difficult challenges presented by the unit programme. She developed engaging proposals both at the scale of the interior and at the vast scale of a site of several kilometres across, bringing landscape and architecture together. She was one of several students this year who understood the architectural possibilities of an anticipatory design that could adapt to future needs and conditions, something that a masterplan cannot do.

the landscape of the interior of a building
The site was a parking garage to be considered as an interior topography. Kristine studied in detail the materiality of the garage floor as a starting point for the design of a mini topography in the park house.

the road as a seed for a future settlement, as an architectural landscape infrastructure.
The shift of scales between the interior seen as if it were a landscape, and the large scale wild rocky landscape on the north coast of the volcanic island of Tenerife was made with ease and confidence. Kristine made direct conceptual and spatial links between the existing agricultural structure of the land and a new infrastructure that could support the potential for future settlements and unknown future uses.

the apartment , the raw shell / the infrastructure of a building or a building cluster.
Kristine worked with large scale field elements as architectural cultivations in the landscape. Large horizontal land plates became the future infrastructural roof planes of future settlements. The drainage of these landscape elements gave measure and form to these elements. (The subject of her technical thesis was land irrigation and drainage systems applied in this project.)

1999
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