The construction of the new train station of Granada offers the possibility to create a new gate into the town, symbolically marking its entry and organizing its growth. The proposal offers not only a new train infrastructure but an urban system as well, composed of buildings and landscape. It also assumes a role of representation – while historically, buildings of religious and secular power generated and organized the city, today it is the new infrastructures that act as urban catalysers.

The opportunity to build a train station in this area of the city allows us to define urban, transport, communication, social and commercial services, with dwelling, offices, shopping malls, a hotel, and a park with leisure and sports areas. We propose a layered area where it will be possible to work, live, shop and relax in the same areas and structures. It is a concept similar to the organization of old towns, thus avoiding the creation of an isolated one-activity ghetto. Due to the need to resolve the existing accesses and to consolidate the surrounding urban fabric (today slashed in half by the physical barrier of the train tracks), we propose to build the main areas of the infrastructure underground. The station’s concourse works on a different level than the street. All transportation can easily access through the ramps associated with the streets, and the public through entries in the park and the new buildings. The main entry is connected to the station’s service tower, located at the intersection of the main avenue with the Los Andaluces avenue. Above the concourse there is a shopping floor that will bring a sustainable, intense and appealing use to the area. On the surface, space is left open and an urban park is created, establishing the transition between the different scales and paths among the adjacent areas, effectively liberating and organizing the Pajaritos and San Jerónimo precincts. High-rise buildings that organize the landscape and vertically connect the underground parts of the programme, such as the parking lot, the shopping level and the train station, punctuate the park itself. The construction of several truncated towers emphasises the new centrality and entry in the town, allowing visual framings to reference points such as the Alhambra citadel, the Albacin area and the Sierra Nevada mountain range. It thus constructs a unique and recognizable cityscape. The proposed whole has as visual reference the silhouette created by the Alhambra towers, the project being conceived as a sort of artificial mountain range. The scale of the intervention, the distribution of the buildings, their profile and materiality create a close dialogue between the new area and the Alhambra. On another level, the arabesque pathways in the park, seemingly random, are created in the image of the urban fabric of Almohad origins of the Albacin and of the Islamic decorative patterns, which might be found at the various palaces in the Alhambra built during the Moorish dynasty. The park functions on two levels. At the first (street level), pathways are created to connect the adjacent walking transit movements and work as access areas to the different programmes, circulation, jogging and cycling areas and leisure zones. On a second level there are green and hard-floored spaces where different activities (distributed among the several “islands”) can be performed: kindergartens, sports areas, leisure and culture areas, swimming pools and outdoor spas. At the rocky topography of the islands “caves” are created, which work as large tunnels to transport light and natural ventilation to the underground levels, as well as to create water “crates”, lakes and pools with different activities in the park. Groups of large trees will be planted in the area, and these will work as its green lung. These devices explore the themes of light and water, so strongly present in Andalusian culture, and they create a strong contrast with the materiality of the paving and buildings. Furthermore, the creation of spaces of shadow is extremely necessary in a city with a climate as Granada’s. The constructions assume the shape of some type of “solid rock”, as opposed to the glass box aesthetics so closely associated with this type of programme. We propose a more immediate link to adobe buildings, conceiving ours in a kind of rammed earth concrete. The project seeks to synthesize the dialogue of the Arab and Andalusian cultures, which has shaped the way that the city’s conception is defined and its very identity nowadays.