Baby Pluto
A creative refuge in La Punta, Valencia
Situated between the City of Arts in Valencia and the piles of containers in the port of Pinedo, the area of La Punta is barely surviving the macro-projects that surround it. Several dozen creators have been defending local culture for some time now in Pluto, a safe and collaborative working environment in La Punta, just a 10-minute bike ride from the city centre. Baby Pluto is the extension of these workshops in the adjoining warehouse to establish itself as a creative island in the middle of the Valencian countryside.
Adobe, raffia and pine wood. With these materials, 6 alternative work spaces are generated that allow young artists from Valencia to have a decent workshop in the middle of an agricultural environment and to participate in the subaltern cultural network of the city.
For this reason, the existing structure of the warehouse was interpreted as a second skin for the future workshops. Inside this hall we had to create a unique space, a fortress for art. And what better protection in a hostile environment than trenches. Sandbag trenches are used in conflicts to protect the attackers on each side. Creation and its art must be shielded in an increasingly hostile, mercantile and dehumanised society that prevents places of creation in its cities. For this reason, it was decided to use the superadobe method, a vernacular construction method that consists of filling earth in raffia sacks in continuous overlapping.
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This technique is used to delimit the workshops and, once inside, a light structure of pine wood allows each craftsman to make the space his own, covering it, discovering it, signifying it...
A contrast of limits between a tectonic outline like the superadobe sacks and an interior that is much lighter, airier and freer.
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The project was conceived from the beginning as a local project, with local materials, local people and local architects. Given its counter-cultural position with respect to the city of Valencia, it could not be otherwise. The earth, the protagonist of this adventure, comes from the excess after working the fields adjacent to Pluto. The wood comes from the neighbourhood wood store, right in front of the premises. The carpenter is one of the craftsmen working in one of the workshops. The workers were Yuri, a Russian refugee to whom Pluto has given a space, and Carlo Frio, a Valencian musician who works in construction in the absence of making a living from music. The architect, me, who lives just 5 minutes away by bike.
This human microcosm has produced a project with a minimal carbon footprint, supported people at risk of social exclusion, used soil and water mixed and compressed by hand and all this without waste as the excess soil has been returned to the land.
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Superadobe is a construction technique used in areas that are difficult to access or after a natural disaster, as it normally comes from the soil resources of the same places where the intervention is going to take place. In this case we found ourselves with a surplus of fertile soil after having worked Pluto's vegetable garden, 10 tonnes to be exact. From there, the idea of implementing the superadobe in the project arose because it was an economical option, with no material cost and which, in addition, solved the excess of soil. The lifespan of the workshops is indeterminate, so this solution runs parallel to the uncertain future of the project: when it is finished, all the soil used will be returned to the fields of l'Horta Sud, as no cementitious additives have been used, and it will continue to be fertile. In this way we are able to close the material cycle of the land.
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