A City within a City
Alicante, Spain
2023






On the waterfront of Alicante, where the maritime edge is scaled to ships and infrastructure rather than to people, the project forms a human edge — a self-contained volume through which the city reaches the sea. Its section layers volumes that step down to the body: an internal street runs along the periphery, while the centre is freed, so the building carries the logic of streets, rooms and squares within its own envelope.
Lightness governs everything — the structure, the material, and the gentle way the building meets the ground — a deliberate counterpoint to the port’s heaviness. Modularity carries the argument further: the volume is conceived as a system open to reconfiguration, adaptable to programmes and futures not yet defined. Can a threshold also be a world in itself? The project suggests it can — that the mediation between city and water need not be a thin membrane but a habitable depth, a fragment of city inserted at the exact point where the city previously ended.
Information
Type Cultural
Status Competition
Surface 18,000 m2
Client The City of Alicante
Team Madhusudhan Chalasani, Jesús Garrido Valdivia, Chanda Patel, Vamsi Kundanam, Arif, Tanvi Jain and Achyutha in partnership with Atelier Atlántico and Abraham Castro