The Walden Island: Reflections on Taller de Arquitecura’s last City in Space

Abstract

The Walden 7 project by Taller de Arquitectura, is an outstanding example of architectural experimentation and exploration of new housing forms around the idea of community. Also, in terms of research on the geometric formal generation, searching from the beginning for a homogeneous generative network, which will evolve in the definitive solution of their city in space. Many of these issues are relatively well known. However, the Walden 7 building is, in reality, the first phase of a much larger housing complex called Walden Island, where Taller de Arquitectura works with a geometric mesh, capable of ordering the space, like the European utopian proposals of Superstudio or Yona Friedman. The importance of this unfinished proposal is that the members of the Taller can transform this geometric support in pursuit of their search for the community and the individual, achieving a feeling of belonging to the place and the vibrant atmosphere of the Mediterranean city. Walden Island represents the end of the line of research that Taller de Arquitectura begins with the publication of their book “Towards a formalization of the city in space”, fulfilling here the premises stated by their authors about open and flexible systems, within of the complex system of cellular aggregation and topological growth that defines the project.