"Beyond the Clouds" - Finalist entry for Smart Harbor competition

"Beyond the Clouds" is a Smart Harbor competition entry by international award-winning experimental team Zuhal Kol, Carlos Zarco Sanz, and Jose Luis Hidalgo. Their proposal was listed as a finalist in the international ideas competition hosted by Young Architects Competitions earlier this year.

Focused on exploring the potential value of the world's harbors, the competition challenged participants to reimagine existing harbor sites into a modern recreational and tourist area -- with the freedom to interpret the meaning of recreation to their own accord. Participants also had to account the social, political, and economic relationships of the harbor with the modern city environment into their designs.

Scroll down to see project images and to learn more about the proposal.

Project description

"BEYONDTHECLOUDS

The previous shipbuilding industry in Pesaro ceased in 2012 as the economic crisis in Europe shifted industrial economic focus of the city for a touristic investment. With these new developments, the new edge of the harbor has been realized to host a touristic port and left the harbor abandoned. Although this feature gives the site a strategic value and could make it the first and preeminent interface between the city and its tourists, such investments could have catastrophic consequences rather than sustaining the income of the city. Therefore, the project focuses on the specific existing features and equipment of the site to understand how the industrial past could have opportunities for a future tourism area."

"Beyondtheclouds stands as an exploration of opportunities as the shifting economic circumstances invite designers to a transformed disciplinary characterized by flexibility, dynamism, immateriality, and indeterminacy in response to such emergent variegations. The project aims to create working public architecture that operates at an urban scale considering its existing potentials and connections with the city while employing an incremental soft infrastructure to test a possible future program of the site and to support such an area of “fun to escape”. "

"RE-FORM/RE-CESSION/RE-USE

Although the termination of one program leads a new one, the project aims to “experiment” the change in the first hand rather than proposing a vast investment, and therefore, it investigates/considers/forces the potentials of the existing structures, tools, spaces in the site with nomadic/ephemeral/temporal solutions which may end up being stable at the site or suggest stable structures for themselves if the use is successful. This kind of nomadic urbanites is crucial for a transforming area since they provide a framework for investigating theories of spatial practices as a means of examining problems within contemporary urban societies."

"COLLECTIVE FRAMEWORK/INFRASTRUCTURE

The new programmatic proposal for the site also brings the issue on how to address energy supports in a complex economy of entertainment, marine and tourism that relies upon this ecology. Therefore, beyondtheclouds proposes an infrastructure that aims to seam the production systems and vibrant cultures; this infrastructure offers a shape-shifting energy generation system of airborne turbines which is capable of harvesting renewable energy of wind power. While the system allows numerous ways to engage with the energy resources of the site as its moves become a public, dynamic, reactive, interactive performance; the shifting cloud/s it creates leads to a system that can also generate a collective framework ultimately avoiding the breakdown of its public sphere. As the weather changes, the site changes; being visible from many parts of the city, this public connection establishes itself as a leading destination for the urban community and visiting tourists alike."

"The proposal offers transformation of an ex- industry zone into a recreational zone supported by ecologic infrastructure; these often conflicting uses of space are intentionally overlapped with the design demonstrating that the combined advantages can be greater than the sum of otherwise individual parts. Beyondtheclouds is simultaneously a public space, a dynamic energy icon and an experiment in between the negotiation of economics, ecosystems and cultural values."

Click here for more info.

All images courtesy of Zuhal Kol, Carlos Zarco Sanz, and Jose Luis Hidalgo.