Floating

Floating is a project that materialises the dream that floats in every generation of Madrid citizens’ minds: bringing the coast to the city. It is a hydraulic machine composed of two elements: an extensive artificially natural beach and its vertical fold translated into a thermal program. Both components are connected by one only protagonist: the water.

A topography which mutates the beach into a park in winter and a lightweight metal structure with inserted thermal paths.\nThe complex is located in Cantarranas, one of the three great sport plain-areas in Ciudad Universitaria. Its choice results from the superposition of hydraulic and geographic strata: allowing the collection of runoff waters, visibility from the A6 motorway, proximity to the neuralgic point of Ciudad Universitaria and a flat topography. The project approaches with an urban view one of the places with less use and more potential in the city, and creates a prominent public space.\nColourless is the water and colourless is the complex. Its construction is based in the search for transparency above all. The swimming pools, as the main elements of the project, are designed in methacrylate. Similarly, a fully practicable vertical and horizontal enclosure made of cellular polycarbonate eliminates the barriers between inside and outside. \nThe structure of the building dreams and achieves a concept: it floats. A large concrete podium floats on the beach. The podium is designed with large concrete beams of 6-meter-width that save 45-meter spans. At the top, a grid composed of 5x5 meters steel pillars uplifts which is broken by the insertion of metal frames, which serve as foundation for methacrylate swimming pools. The entire structure is braced and tied by the horizontally integrated walkways that generate the thermal routes. \nA beach without external water supply is achieved. Its condition of being a valley, added to the presence of one of the Madrid boreholes inside it, enables to sum the collection of runoff water, and the extraction of water from the aquifer,. This results in no need for external water supply. The circuit of the water is the most crucial part. It is raised by hydraulic machines, and from its upper level, water begins to flow down by gravity. The water overflows the circuit, pours from one swimming pool to another, braches and reaches the showers…. Until it finally flows to the podium to discharge on the beach. The whole set represents a perfect hydraulic organism.