The thesis develops a project proposal for Santa Fe, the first port city of Argentina located on the Rio Paranà. Its origin and location are deeply connected to water. Along its coast, one can perceive the original importance of this triangle of land located between the Paranà and the Salado, a strategic territory of exchange between the railways that innervated the pampa and the river connections with the important cities of this South American area. Here, alongside the city's confused attempts to rethink its role, the large port machinery resonates with the 19th-century stations and together, in their deterioration, tell of the progressive loss of the fortune of the place. However, the unstable and sometimes dramatic relationship between water and land remains as the formal matrix of the collective space. Here the great Avenida constitutes a limit between the city and the port while the water becomes a liquid threshold between the port and the barrio of Altoverde, increasing divisions and diversity, both social and economic. Between these two elements, the port area is proposed as a place of possible relationships, offering opportunities for the rediscovery of ancient ties to the history of the city. The thesis, therefore, investigates specific aspects of the relationship of the port with the historical heritage, the settlement pattern, and the landscapes of the river, prefiguring new possible destinies. Artifice and nature, city, and river have always been the backbone of the Argentine territory. These two different landscapes deeply characterize the city of Santa Fe. The man-made landscape consists mainly of three textures. The city made up of a checkerboard layout is a regular saturated design that is broken up by the railway network, the port with its confused texture that is made up of certain and uncertain spaces, accessible and inaccessible, characterized by the presence of large port buildings, finally High green, a complex structure of endless labyrinths and corridors without sidewalks that intertwine with the buildings of ranchos very close together. This artificial landscape contrasts with the natural one, the large river system characterized by an ever-changing landscape made up of water and earth, which by withdrawing alternately blurs the same horizontal line in different ways, transforming the landscape into intertwining lines, islands that sink and always re-emerge diverse, changing yet ancestral scenarios. It is between these two great systems that the project fits. The proposal is to define a spatial device capable of holding the different landscapes together and having a perception of them, a unitary place where the different types of public space manage to build a continuous system, made up of nature, water, and artifice, which unites the three entities while maintaining their autonomy and landscape, in a single space that balances the relationship between the city and the original land.

Masterplan

Project renderings

ground level design, Altoverde

Acrylic on paper, axonometric drawing

models