LIQUID FIELDS

The notion of "field" as it pertains to place—and no longer "context," or at least contextual—suggests a new, more open, abstract, flexible, and receptive (reactive) condition for contemporary design (Gausa et al., 2000).

In this context, this work emerges as a proposal for a Graduation Design Project. Beyond that, it serves as a critical reflection on contemporary landscapes and their relevance in the design process. It reconsiders the territory as a complex and hybrid material, resulting from the fusion between architecture and landscape, city and countryside, in an intermediate field between the natural and the artificial.

Through a view of the territory that is more processual, coherent, and above all, sensitive from an environmental and landscape perspective, we propose a productive park, a tourist winery, a programmatic hybrid that, in the location where it is implemented, produces a positive outcome from the following fusion:

Tourism + Production + Research.

We propose to design with the landscape by interpreting it from its operative condition, merging project and nature into a sustainable new entity. We use nature as construction material. We propose creating artificial topography where architecture blends with the landscape; the ground folds and becomes almost imperceptible, erasing boundaries between natural and artificial geography. Thus, a new continuum between what is constructed and what is natural is achieved, creating an extended territory.

The territory of the Department of Colonia served as a conceptual instrument that provided important references for the project: the physical space and its functional overlaps with the interrelations between landscape and production.