Malba Puertos Project: Rethinking the Relationship Between Vegetation and Urban Life
City of Puertos: An Experiment in Environmental Urban Planning
The city of Puertos spans a vast area of approximately 2,500 hectares within Escobar District in Buenos Aires Province. This city serves as a model for studying sustainable urban planning, where planners aim to integrate environmental and cultural activities within the urban fabric in a balanced manner.
Rethinking Aerial and Environmental Living
The project focuses on designing urban environments that allow people to interact with nature on a daily basis while maintaining ecological balance. This includes the development of expansive green spaces, the creation of walking paths among planted mangrove trees, and providing areas for outdoor cultural and educational activities.
A Public Museum as a Cultural Engine
As part of this experiment, a public museum was designed featuring six exhibition halls, three indoor and three outdoor, distributed between built structures and open spaces. This design aims to create an interactive path through the orchard, where visitors can experience art and nature in an integrated way, enhancing both cultural and environmental understanding simultaneously.
Site Exploration and Vegetation Study
The first phase of the project began with a detailed study of the site, where planners discovered entire forests of Tessaria integrifolia, commonly known as river mangrove. Such a discovery provided a scientific foundation for launching a comprehensive research and experimental process, involving a team of scientists, conservation specialists, and soil experts.
Field and Experimental Studies
This phase included collecting samples from various locations and analyzing the soil to assess the optimal environmental conditions for the plants. Based on the results, experiments began to propagate and protect the plants using various techniques, with careful monitoring of developments every two weeks under different stimuli.
Establishing Nurseries and Intensive Planting
To ensure the sustainability of the project, two field nurseries were established to cultivate approximately 2,500 river mangrove trees. Observations indicated that this species grows rapidly, allowing for the creation of dense plant coverage within a short period and enhancing the ecological functions of the green spaces within the city.
Malba Forest: Integrating Nature into the Urban Fabric
The research phase concluded with the design of Malba Forest, a planted strip approximately 150 meters long that weaves between and interacts with buildings, becoming a natural and integrated part of the urban environment. This project serves as a model for studying how green spaces can be incorporated into cities in a way that enhances both human experience and ecological functions.
Public Halls and Elevated Walkways
The forest features three flexible public halls, each ranging up to 200–150 square meters, connected by a system of floating metal walkways. These pathways allow visitors to walk above the ground and view the forest from a new perspective, creating a sensory experience that blends nature and architecture.
Educational and Experimental Spaces
Each hall opens onto a space within the dense forest of approximately 2,000 square meters, designed to emulate the feel of the natural forests that once existed on the site. These spaces act as cultural and experimental zones, providing an educational environment where visitors can understand the relationship between nature and urban areas, and explore the environmental and social impacts of integrating vegetation into city landscapes.
The Forest as an Ecological and Hydraulic Structure
This forest serves as a model of both environmental and hydraulic infrastructure. It is not merely a green space, but an integrated system designed to simulate the natural conditions in which river mangrove trees thrive.
Custom Soil Design and Simulating Natural Pulses
The forest contains a large basin holding approximately 7,500 cubic meters of specially designed soil to replicate natural flooding, water flow, and salinity levels. An advanced irrigation and drainage system fills and empties this soil with water, simulating the “pulses” of the plants’ native environment and protecting them from the effects of the adjacent saline layer.
Restoring Native Vegetation
The forest consists of around 2,200 trees derived from local genes, propagated to restore part of the original plant fabric of the site. This project enables the creation of a pioneering artificial forest, combining relocated plant species with elements of the original environment.
Systematic and Dense Planting
Planting was designed systematically and densely, incorporating trees of different age classes to reflect the natural social structure of river mangrove communities. This design creates a balanced environment that supports plant growth, restores ecological equilibrium to the site, and emphasizes sustainability and biodiversity.
The First Artificial Mangrove Forest: Reassessing the Ecosystem
The first artificial mangrove forest was established as an innovative step to reevaluate a remaining ecosystem in the area, which was once rich but had gradually declined. This project serves as a model for understanding how biodiversity can be restored and life brought back to degraded landscapes.
A Dynamic Woodland Park
The forest functions as a vibrant, dynamic environment, combining sounds, colors, plants, and animals to enhance a fully immersive sensory experience for visitors. This setting also helps raise awareness about the importance of biodiversity and the conservation of natural ecosystems.
Integrated Architectural Design
The three halls float above the vegetation, engineered to support weights of up to three tons, allowing for a variety of cultural activities. The modular flooring system, connected with aluminum joints, enables lighting from beneath the forest, creating an innovative architectural experience that seamlessly merges nature and engineering.
Elevated Walkways and the Integration of Urbanity and Nature
The forest walkways are supported by a longitudinal beam, allowing visitors to move easily above the vegetation without disturbing the ecosystem below. This design strikes a balance between architectural infrastructure and nature, offering a unique experience that combines walking with visual exploration of green spaces.
Urban Perspective and a Future Ecosystem
The project merges an urban vision of public spaces with a systemic and environmental approach, proposing a possible future for cities. In this future, science and creativity collaborate to achieve common goals, with research becoming a fundamental part of innovation processes. Meanwhile, the landscape reclaims its leading role in shaping spatial life, reinventing the relationship between the ground and the sky within the urban environment.
✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight
The Malba Puertos project can be seen as an experimental model highlighting the theoretical potential of integrating artificial vegetation into the urban environment, particularly regarding the interaction between humans and nature and the restoration of some degraded ecosystems. Notable advantages include the provision of educational and experimental spaces, as well as a fully immersive sensory experience within the city, which can serve as an inspiration for future research in environmental architecture.
However, the project remains at a limited experimental stage and raises several questions about its scalability, long-term maintenance costs, and the sustainability of the artificial ecosystem compared to natural forests. The architectural approach also requires a deeper study to assess how these forests integrate with the existing urban fabric, especially in densely populated cities or those with water constraints. Moreover, incorporating environmental and hydraulic elements into architecture remains a complex challenge, as balancing aesthetic, educational, and ecological functions demands careful consideration to avoid negative impacts on infrastructure or the practical use of spaces.
This project can serve as an experimental framework for developing more flexible and applicable design strategies in different urban contexts, with a focus on continuous evaluation of environmental functions and operational costs before implementing them in larger-scale projects.
