The curse of digital photography: Hundreds – no, thousands – of images taken on a trip, then downloaded on to a hard drive, where they disappear from view more effectively than slide trays boxed up at the back of a closet.
So this week, we’ll pull out images from a trip to Madrid taken last May, specifically those of Madrid Rio – a 10-km greenway built over a buried freeway, which I first read about here in the New York Times (December, 2011):
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The park called Madrid Río … (is) more than six miles long, and transforms a formerly neglected area in the middle of Spain’s capital. Its creation, in four years, atop a complex network of tunnels dug to bury an intrusive highway, also rejuvenates a long-lost stretch of the Manzanares River, and in so doing knits together neighborhoods that the highway had cut off from the city center.
The M-30 disappearing into the tunnel under Madrid Rio
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… the park belongs to a larger transformation that includes the construction of dozens of new metro and light-rail stations that link far-flung, disconnected and often poor districts on Madrid’s outskirts to downtown. …
… a group of local architects, led by Ginés Garrido, who teamed up with Adriaan Geuze and his high-profile Dutch urban design and landscape firm, West 8. They proposed no grand new time-consuming, budget-breaking monuments, but a suite of modest new bridges, along with the renovation of some great historic ones, amid a variety of green spaces.
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The park was to be generally informal, low-key and practical, in certain respects more American than European, full of playgrounds and ball fields and bike paths.
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More tomorrow.
