Architectural Design Archive
Off the Grid
The project arises from a real opportunity: TESLA, a renewable energy and a sustainable mobility company, is looking for a place to construct its new electric vehicle factory in Europe. The fictitious proposal is an infrastructural and corporate-marketing development in Puerto de Cádiz. This infrastructure contains two programmatic variables, hybridizing spaces for clients’ leisure and industrial production.

‘The consumer’. In a consumer society, brand architecture is essential for sales and for the values transmission’ of a corporation. The leisure program for the visitors aims to convert the client into an active agent in the production process, pursuing the consumption of their products. Examples such as Coney Island Luna Park or the 'Pleasure piers' in the twentieth century reflected these atmospheres; spaces by the sea that submerged visitors in a vortex of leisure and pleasure that encouraged compulsive consumption.

‘The consumed’. As any other product of the company, the vehicle production program presents an innovative character. A series of specific and 100% sustainable urban strategies, help to eliminate the traditional physical limit between these infrastructures and cities. The contemporary factory is understood as an extension of the urban fabric, which it can also become part of industrial processes.

Off the Grid is a critic position towards traditional productive fabrics, which have evolved alien to society and cities. The hybrid program, based on the productive and the hedonistic of vehicles, has been used as an argument to generate architectural spaces and investigate new tools that allow implementing sustainable infrastructures in the contemporary city.