I have come to an interest on coastal condition of South-West Spain, how this stretch of coastline transform through time and how it effects life both inland and in water. I chose to study on Sand Dune, in which it is one of the main conditions along the coastline of Spain. This project is to propose a new typology of soft architecture that would accommodate the dynamic condition of the coastal dune landscape, as an alternative to permanent architecture that typically interferes with the ecology and the development of coastal dunes.
I will first start with introducing the overall Spain coast line, and then going into more details about the topic of “coastal dune”; what it is, its benefits to the natural ecology and geography, as well as its effects on the urban development of Spanish coastline. After that, I will be focusing on one site as a ‘test site’ for developing my prototype. I will propose an intervention based on the specificities of this site and demonstrate its effectiveness regarding its adaptability to the changing dune conditions over time as well as the changing programs.
The coastline of Spain is 7,883 km long, population of about 46 million people, and 60 percent of the people concentrates on the coastline. There are many types of coast, there are coastal lowlands with bays, deltas, river mouth, including wetlands and lagoons, beaches, cliffs and ports.
The facts that first interested me the most is that since 1960s until now, the Spanish coastline has been developing and rapidly transforming from naturally occupied coastline into urbanised occupations with new developments including buildings, and second homes.
What is sand dune? A sand dune is a mount, hill of sand that lies behind parts of the beach. They are formed over many years when windblown, sand is trapped by beach grass and vegetations. Vegetations then anchor the dunes with their roots, holding them temporarily in place.
The typical sand dune transformations will start from beach to the incipient dune, to fore dune, yellow dune and to hind dune.
As an example in the Cadiz area, where I have analysed few areas along its coastline to show the relationship from the beach-front to the inner land, how sand dune becomes a big separation in between them.
Why do we preserve sand dunes? The main reason is firstly, sand dunes protect inland areas from storms, hurricanes, flood-water, wind and wave, and all the factors that cause damages to the inner land. Sand dunes are also the major habitats for coastal plants and animals.
In which relate back to a bigger picture, these damages lead to black spots all over the Spanish coastline, where there are destructions of sand dune occurring, which mostly is caused by wastewater, threats, and constructions of golf courses, resorts and residents. These massive actions have effects on the destruction of sand dunes, which is one of the natural conditions that has been affecting the life, tourism and occupations of the coastline.
However,There are both problems with human activities effecting dune, and dune itself affecting human activities. The human activities that effect dunes are construction sites, vehicle accesses, unplanned infrastructure, and tourism. Tourism and massive human occupations is one of the main reasons that cause damages to sand dunes. On the other hand, the problem of the dune itself create for human are, for example, dune being the separation between the urban development and the sea front, so, to access the sea, you have to get pass these natural “obstacles”. constructions on this unstable ground also become challenging, plus there are:hole and cliffs, steep hills, crowded vegetations and trees, and the instantly growing and changing of sand.
Some of the solutions that have been made to preserve these dune sites are board walks, beach accesses, and sometimes the closure of dune sites to permanently stop the destructions. Although the solutions seems to not be efficient enough.
Which is why I want to solve the problem to give both benefits to human activities and reduce the destruction of dune sites.
For my PROPOSAL: I design a system on sand dune that people can both occupy on and access from the beachfront to the inland area without ruining or destruct the dune site, a structure that could be adapt, move or change constantly with the dynamic dune surface. Where I need to consider: 1. the structure that could adapt with the growing of dunes, 2. stable structural surfaces that people can occupy on, and 3. since I intend to design a system that could be used on any dune site, and therefore it should be able to accommodate with different scales of sites, and as well as a variety of programs.
The specific site that I chose as a test site for this adaptable system, is a site down Cadiz, in the area of what they called “Urban Novo Sancti Petri”, where this area has a series of 4-5 stars hotels lying along the beachfront. I chose the coastal site of the Hotel called “Iberostar Andalusia Playa”. It has a typical characteristic of having dunes more than a hundred meter wide separating the hotel from the beachfront.
From the plans, these are the transformations of how the layouts are created. Starting from marking the flat dunes area, these are the areas that my structures could be build on, because areas with flat dunes have less vegetations, so the structure will not be ruining the plants as much. Then how the combination of line created a connecting systems.
I first put the public toilet and bathroom on a linear line close to the beach front.Then a sunbath area also near the beach front for people to get the most sun.Thirdly, a simple beachside restaurant could be a part of the site as well.Lastly, in this specific site, there are this developed dune areas with trees, where i decided to design benches and sitting areas for it to become leisure areas with fragments of natural shadings from the existing trees.
Here are the elements that are designed to fulfills my proposals:
the grounding strategy: This is the main element of my proposal, where it consists of a device and floor, where the device is consist of the bevel gears, which is the key to manually lift up the floor while adding more screws to the joint, and even different angles of screws when the ground condition is more steep. With additional elements like universal joints, tripod legs base and bearing balls to control the stability and movements of the device. While the floor structure is connected with the device to accommodate bending and movements human occupations.
The following designs are some simple designs of facilities that could easily be add-on and taken off on the floor structures around the site.There are the benches and awnings, even the toilets and bathrooms.
Here is the Axon, and some renderings of the views after the my designs are on site.
In the sections, you can see that my design started to adapt with the growing of sand from year 0 to year 20, how the structure adapt with the movements and growing of dune landscape.
In conclusion, my design do not only create a system of access and adaptable occupations on the sand dune, but also in a way showing and proving that platforms and structure can be build on sand dune without ruining the dunes. In additional, the tripod grounding device also becomes a structure that stabilises the sand dune even more, and rooting with the vegetation roots in the sand dunes as time passes. So, the design is giving both benefits to human occupations and sand dune preservations.