Potential Territories

Potential Territories
Matthäus Merian the Elder - S. Peters Platz in Basel - 17th century
A search for ambiguity as a tool for redefining the dialogue between urban and non-urban environments.
Paco Alfaro Anguita
Madrid and Cuenca, Spain
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Team members
Paco Alfaro Anguita
Field of work
Architecture, Urban planning, Research
Project category
Urbanity
Project submitted
2023

Paco Alfaro Anguita is an architect whose practice wanders around ambiguity and its implications in different approaches to architecture: undefined-vague spaces, the regional condition of the site and the possibilities of architecture on a higher scale, the city and the territory. Moreover, his drawings explore the artistic and narrative capacity of architectural representation as a speculation of the graphic, straining the role of drawing as both as a tool and an end. He also reflects, researches and writes about drawing.

Potential Territories is an open investigation on the concept of ambiguity, framed on landscape design and urban planning from a threefold approach: relational, functional and material.
Perhaps one of the most significant achievements of our time is to envision the territory holistically. Overcoming the viewpoint of the 20th century industrial Europe that define landscape as something given and exogenous to city in most cases, territory is instead conceived today as a common entity, a comprehensive open-for-work entity, regardless of its developing stage. Yet, land is divided into three different general classes -developed, developable and greenfield-, an approach widely accepted across Europe. These classes aim to establish a generalized yet ambiguous territorial acknowledgement, which presents a unique opportunity for reinterpretation and reflection on the contemporary challenges than encounters architecture and urban planning.
Under this framework, a number of projects have been developed, all guided by the principles outlined in the foreword that accompanies the latest project, Translocations. Translocations recently debuted at 6th Culture and Ruralities Forum, held in Cuenca in early July 2023 and explores the tension between objects placed in the landscape and their immediate context, reflexing on critical implications. This and other previously developed exercises seek to uncover new discoveries within the territory and its potentialities, addressing the issue of urban form and architecture within the territory as subjects of study, looking for innovative ways of redefining the merge between the urban and the non-urban.