Silvia Lucchetta - YTAA Shortlist

Senior Community | Sant Mateu d'Albarca

"Linear Landscapes presents an alternative tourism strategy with the purpose of reactivating a rural and semi-abandoned area in the interior of Ibiza. By attracting active senior citizens from around the world, the project addresses social and ecological issues through an entrepreneurial perspective."

Located in the little village of Sant Mateu d’Albarca, Ibiza, Linear Landscapes departs from a reflection on the current tourism situation in the Mediterranean basin. During the last decades, tourism in Ibiza has shown an exponential growth, substituting the previous agricultural economy and generating a new unstable equilibrium where infrastructures are taken to their critical peaks, pollution and seasonal unemployment are a constant. By selecting a site in the interior of the island, the project seeks to provide an alternative economic model for an over-exploited touristic destination.

Linear Landscapes was developed with the consciousness of architecture being part of a bigger and more complex context rather than a stand-alone discipline. With this position in mind, the project wants to tackle the post-crisis tourism scenario in the Mediterranean area, proposing a new strategy for an industry which, despite providing around 90% of the GDP of Ibiza, is showing signs of stagnation and failure.

The current unstable financial scenario should be seen as an opportunity to act and improve outdated models in order to plan a sustainable growth of those industries that have such strong impact in the environment. New strategies for sustainable tourism developments are also an opportunity for architects and architecture to speak up, to gain relevance and foster contextual approaches, something that the discipline has often lacked in the past decades.

Linear Landscapes proposes a new model of tourism in which, through a proactive architectural approach, the success of the strategy does not only lay on the place or the amenities but rather in the developed atmospheres and relations to the context. Architecture here is not tangential to the success, but it is full part of the success, something necessary to move from the decadent ‘sun and beach’ model to one that fosters the specificities and natural features of the place.