Landscape Infrastructure

AFS - Saints Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, Faculty of Architecture

Project idea

The challenges that are facing undeveloped natural areas today are climate changes which significantly tend to attack the quality and quantity of resources provided in the cultivated natural environments. We are increasingly striving to mitigate this phenomenon of climate instability, rather than strategically oppose it and use it as a usable resource. The strategic revival of nature and geography has the potential to develop into a social and political agenda for the modern age.

Project description

For several years the Republic of Macedonia has been hit by unprecedented floods (Pelagonija Valley 2014, Tetovo 2015, Skopje 2016). Climate change and its consequences are the challenges that we are progressively facing in this area. The subject matter of the project is the development of a system for distributing and draining excess water in the valley of Pelagonija, but also creating a local infrastructure that will allow the region to become a useful source of renewable energy using all the available natural elements and an area of industrial development that does not negate the original function of the valley as a "granary" of the country.
Based on the available analyzes (geological, hydrological, archeological, agro technical, etc.) and in consultations with experts and residents of the areas threatened with floods, two risky points were identified that cannot effectively protect Pelagonija from flooding. The further development of this paper will focus on the analysis and development of an infrastructure concept for the first critical point, which covers the central territory of the Pelagonija basin. In addition to being the first zone of impact from natural disasters, it is a zone in which we can see from the analyzes previously described that it is a generally densely populated area, an area in which agriculture and agricultural activities are at a high level because of its geographical predispositions, but at the same time it does not yet possess hydrographics infrastructure that would regulate the irrigation of large agricultural areas. After re-reading the environmental strategies and systems with all their negative aspects, there were proposed infrastructural interventions that integrate the natural context and will strive to significantly improve modern natural economy.

Technical information

INTEGRATIVE AXIS
Applying new and upgrading the old natural and artificial layers, the existing, forgotten structure of a drainage and melioration system, spatially applied to the region of the first critical point, dates back to the 70's, currently defragmented and useless. Within that system, a channel is identified that will become the center of the renewed and expanded system. The final intervention has a general, strategic approach in its proposal and a specific structural product from the analyzed material and structural archive.
The global challenge to tackle natural disasters, which in large measure cause damage with floods in winter periods in this system, creates conditions for the development of preventive surface as accumulative depression. It is dimensioned according to the data on the maximum capacity of flows of Crna Reka obtained from the Hydrometeorological Administration in the Republic of Macedonia, which is 10 times higher than the usual. The dimensioning provides a condition for the capacity of this depression to be able to accumulate such a flood wave in an hour, in order to get the time to mobilize the local population.
The accumulative depression contains a larger preventive basin and a continuously functional basin that functions for the irrigation system. From it, an underground pipeline network develops, which provides to each of the enlarged arable areas several plugs from which they can be irrigated. This way of water circulation brings these two systems in harmony with natural hydrographic phenomena, because they use water on the move, without creating oversized accumulation lakes with a negative impact on local biodiversity.
STRUCTURAL TREATMENT
Groups of structural entities connected in a structural composition are a general concept in designing new interventions and a draft concept from which legislation/building law can be developed in protected natural areas. A single element elaborates more constructive and functional scenarios that examine its justification in a concrete strategy with limiting construction features.
By using one and only element, in this case, the reinforced concrete pillar with dimensions 10x10cm in a characteristic section with a height of 3 meters, used in different roles (pillar, beam, wall) of the only constructive system, provides a functional and flexible modular space, which is adapted to more functional units in the technical development of this paper.
GENERATIVE AXIS
In further elaboration, there is a need of emergence of structures, contents that will create a space in which central institutions would operate to manage and develop the planned infrastructure and all existing processes in the surrounding context.
One of the positions that directly relates to the culturally integrative principle is an intervention in the scope of the archaeological site. Its phenomenon is due to the essential need for a spatial module that will provide conditions for direct research activity, a laboratory for the examination of inventions, a workshop for additional archeological activities and space for their exposure.
The second structural grouping is positioned normally on the dominant line intervention, along the course of an existing drainage channel. In the immediate vicinity of the accumulation basin, it creates a space for the administrative and socio-cultural center that plays a dual role in the infrastructure system itself. The administrative role is to provide space for state institutions that would manage the water and land reclamation systems in this region. The socio-cultural center has its role in the existing processing activity in this area and involves people as the main actors in that event. It creates space for their education, individual and group gatherings, the sale of necessary resources and a place for general management of their activities, production and sales.
The third structural phenomenon is aimed at creating a minimal sheltered space that would function modularly along the perimeter of each aggregate arable land and would have the function of storage space for the necessary tools or would be a space for storage and processing of agricultural products. Its modules are closed with mesh, metallic material in order to achieve ventilation and air circulation in the storage area.
CRITICAL REVIEW
The challenge is to apply and renew the applied structural network in relation to the natural phenomena and needs perceived by the current way of using the landscape. The structure itself would integrate the whole region into a production unit that, besides its production capacities, will simultaneously enrich the context with a preventive phenomenon that builds on the circular functioning of natural processes and thus stimulates the functional capacity of the landscape.
Nature is part of all human activities. Do we help by neglecting it?