New landscapes Part 2 Project 1999 Lorena Camisuli Delgado Architectural Association London | UK The proliferation of golf-courses on the Costa del Sol has been intimately linked with the growth of residential tourism. Front line golf property is now as popular as front-line beach property.The Costa del Sol has now become the Costa del Golf.As a case study I take on an existing brief of an ongoing urban development, a project of a touristic complex in Malaga, Spain. A golf course, housing and infrastructure of traffic, supply and drainage to serve the land, constitute the three forms of occupation implemented onto the rural site.The act of colonisation, is determined through the relationship of the body to the terrain. An opportunity for a landscape project far from inherited organisations and social modes.The process of investigation is divided into operations, a type of classification. Each of the orders are allowed free movement, each colonizing according to their own parameters and rules of behaviour, reacting to topography andclimatic contexts independently.The project then questions the use of typologies as an operational device, and encourages a proliferation of parameters from material organisations.The co-existance of forms of occupation derive from the suerposition of the diagrams, which were negotiated by using the criteris of maximizing their exclusivity, despite their adjacencies and overlaps.The tectonic resolution of the project continuous to search for ground and roof plane, becoming constructions of the diagram. Local partial assesments reveal a new and emergent topography which shapes the diagram closer to a physical construction.Unlike a conventional touristic complex based on hierarchies, zoning,etc., the alternative formation proposes wherethe interdependance of the layers allows for a more exciting play of golf, a game in a strange topography. A shelter which shapes a landscape providing privacy, accesability, frontage,tec. But at the same time provoking, enriching those original relationships of the physical self to the terrain. Lorena Camisuli Delgado Our nomination of Lorena Camisuli for this year's RIBA's Silver Medal is based on the particularblend of techniques and influences that her project has been able to gather, opening what we believe is very promising domain.Lorena's project approaches as a theoretical thesis the subject of context, using as a study case a real project, the design of a golf resort in her hometown, Estepona.The most surprising of Lorena's project is her idea to use a purely commercial development, a golf resort,as a potential field of architectural generation. By using and intensifying the most banal and factual conditions of these type of developments, frontage to the course, insolation, accesability,...Lorena's project manages to produce an alternative model of organisation for these type of developments, triggering the virtualities embedded in these type of comercial operations. Knowing that every three days, a golf course is opened, we can imagine the importance of thisproject....But beyond the choice of the project, there are several architectural issues that are revealed through Lorena's research.Perhaps the most remarkable is the study of the relationship between the landscape and the physical self, and her approach to context not as a picturesque set of images of local or foreign origin, but rather as the culture of local traces through an artificial set of requirements. These issues are constructed in Lorena's project throughthe registration and sampling of a variety of geographical and climatic characteristics, modes of colonisationrelated to age and social groups,...transformed and re-organized on an abstract level to implement her design strategies. The diagram as a material organisation able to incorporate and proliferate localspecificity has been rigorously mastered in her thesis.The outcome of this project is therefore unexpected and yet precise, determined but open to development. Repetition and difference , order and contingency, meet in this project to produce organizations that are no longer driven towards a fashionable outcome from which we are growing increasingly tired, but by the rigorous culture of real architectural possibilities. Lorena's rigorous use of techniques and mapping and geometrical transformation allow her to produce what we could call, quoting Rudofski's famous title 'architecture without architects, with architects'. A remarkable cross fertilisation betweeb abstract techniques and the concreteness of architectural construction is in our opinion the other powerful statement of this project, that dares venturing in a domain long time deserted by the avant-garde of the architectural academia, with astonishing results.Lorena's project is a statement against all these more fashionable products of the academis and the culture industry. A re-discovery of architecture is what we are praising inthis nomination. And, of course, a natural talent to design....