Off the map

Infrastructures are understood as systems of monumental scale that make an extraordinary effort to satisfy very specific needs. But what happens when their construction is not completed? What value can bring to the landscape an element of monumental scale, designed to fulfill a specific function which, paradoxically, has become obsolete?

The vertex that joins the municipalities of Torrelodones, Las Rozas and Galapagar is the origin of what is probably the craziest project ever built in Spain: The Guadarrama Canal, a route of almost 700 km long that was intended to connect Madrid with the Atlantic Ocean.\r\nThis utopia of granting Madrid an outlet to the sea would not become a reality until the late 18th century, when it began to raise in this location El Gasco Dam, a colossal structure of more than 90 meters high destined to become the highest dam in the world. A dream that, after its structural collapse during its construction, ended up being the tomb of a frustrated project, victim of its own ambition.\r\nIn 1937, the Republican offensive that would unleash the Battle of Brunete was prepared from this same location. This one stood out, besides for its crudeness, for its international diffusion through the photographs of Robert Capa and Gerda Taro. Photographs that, although they were printed in our memory, would be lost in a suitcase that was missing for 60 years.\r\nThe project, an archive of landscape’s memory, is born with a double purpose: to recover and store the vestiges of these two events; and to exhibit them, to make them no longer belong to anyone but to all of us. In this way, the aim is to make these two stories visible through their legacy in order to make them coincide, not only in space, but also in time.\r\nWhen infrastructures fail, the paradox of the obsolescence of the merely pragmatic occurs. In exchange for this loss of functionality, they acquire a new condition that is the opposite of their original nature: a symbolism, a meaning that makes them the visible legacy of a specific period.\r\nThe project does not pretend to be an architectural imposition that remedies the situation of oblivion of a place in decline; but rather a new stage in its history which offers an unprejudiced reading of an anthropized landscape that is stripped of its romanticism to turn it into a land of opportunity.