Second Prize
Unveiling the Ruins: Reinterpreting History to Create a New Story
Spain / 1803
Between two streams of water lies a dryland agricultural plain, surrounded by population centers and marked by moments of transformation. In 1930, a masia was converted into a military barracks, and around it, structures associated with military activity emerged: soldiers’ houses, shooting ranges, ammunition depots… Today, only scattered fragments remain, vestiges of a seemingly ephemeral past whose traces still resonate.
Remnants of a house, a solitary staircase in the middle of the terrain, the paving stones of an old training ground, and most notably, the ammunition depots, stand as silent wit-nesses. These elements remind us that the past never truly vanishes; it intertwines with the memory of the landscape, even as boundaries blur, buildings crumble, and vegetation reclaims its domain.
Jury Statement: This project reclaims a forgotten military landscape not as a static monument, but as a dynamic terrain of discovery, memory, and play. Through careful attention to buried materialities and ecological processes, the design invites users to engage with layers of contested history—reinterpreting ruins as participatory infrastructure rather than relics of decay. The proposal’s phased, community-driven strategy blurs the line between archaeology and landscape practice, transforming excavation into collective meaning-making. Its inventive reuse of rubble and remnant elements into social and biodiversity nodes reflects a rare blend of poetic sensibility and pragmatic design. The jury recognizes mature design attitude that takes on a difficult task of transforming a bleak tragedy of the past into a poetic playground for the future.