Leah Altman
P002 → Urban Frame
Course: ARCH202 Option Studio 2, Winter 2025, UC Berkeley
Spanish Culinary Center and Research Hostel
Instructor: Rene Davids
Studio in collaboration with ETSAM: Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid studio taught by Ginés Garrido
The most important part of Spanish culinary culture is community. Groups come together to harvest crops, to cook them, and most importantly– to eat them. Looking to the future, urban resilience is crucial—creating flexible environments that can evolve alongside the city's changing climate and social needs in the decades ahead.This project seeks to bring community and adaptability into the urbanity of Madrid. On the site, a grid is created. This grid then becomes translated into a structural scaffolding that creates the organization of the building – an innermost private core where the building’s programmatic spaces are located, a surrounding semi private ring of mesh greenhouse and garden space, and then an outermost wrapping layer of platforms throughout the structural scaffolding allowing for a public promenade.
Situated between Plaza de España and Plaza Emilio Jiménez Millas, the innermost programmatic layer of the tower corresponds with pathways to significant landmarks—the Royal Palace, Liria Palace, and Plaza Mayor. The structure is elevated, allowing plazas to flow beneath and creating gathering spaces. The tower scaffolding can also grow to extend two "arms," the rotation of which also corresponds to these landmarks and serve as an activation to both plazas.
Drawing inspiration from historical watchtowers—including medieval defense structures and fire watchtowers crucial during the 1790 Plaza Mayor fire—the slender design of the innermost tower prioritizes lookout points while maintaining efficient programming on each level. Each interior programmatic element is thus correlated with a standard modular design. Each element being determined by the grid.
Modularity is essential for long-term resilience and relevance in Madrid’s urban landscape. As climate patterns shift and social needs evolve, these standardized yet flexible modules can be reconfigured without disrupting the building’s structural integrity. This adaptability allows the tower to respond to changing agricultural requirements—accommodating new growing technologies, water conservation methods, or systems that may emerge in coming decades. In a future where urban food security becomes increasingly vital, this design framework allows the tower to function as critical infrastructure that can rapidly scale production during supply chain disruptions or transform to meet Madrid’s priorities.
This center modular tower then gets wrapped in a mesh layer to create dedicated green space and planting areas, creating a vertical ecosystem. Beyond food production, these spaces reduce the tower’s internal temperature and improve air quality. The distributed nature of these growing areas also ensures that plant diseases or pests cannot devastate the entire production.
The outermost layer of scaffolding is a public space that is meant to be flexible in its programming while also holding platforms to create a public promenade that spirals around the tower’s exterior. The promenade allows visitors to witness urban agriculture in practice, connecting directly with food production processes typically hidden from urban dwellers. The pathway also creates natural opportunities for interaction and exchange. During festivals and celebrations, the promenade transforms into a vertical extension of the plazas below, hosting pop-up dining experiences and cultural performances that activate the entire vertical structure.
This tower acts as a permeable boundary between agriculture and city that reimagines the relationship between food production and public space. As climate patterns shift and urban centers evolve, the modular framework ensures this structure will adapt while maintaining its essence— a beacon of community resilience that elevates Madrid’s plaza culture and culinary traditions into a vertical celebration of shared experience.