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Architects: Eduardo Peón , Elías Group, Oficina de Vinculación UNAM, Valia Wright
- Area: 92570 ft²
- Year: 2020
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Photographs:Onnis Luque
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Manufacturers: GCC, Microsoft Office
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Lead Architect: Milton Durán
Text description provided by the architects. In 2019 the Mexican Ministry of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development through the Urban Improvement Program chose Ciudad Juarez as one of the sixteen cities with marginalized neighborhoods to build public spaces to improve the quality of life of their inhabitants. In an area of high marginalization to the east of the city, the Tierra Nueva neighborhood, characterized by being a housing area provided by the state, where a community of migrants coexists who come to this city in search of a better job in the local industry. In this context, Parque Oriente, a municipal park, is the meeting point that provides the necessary space for the development of sporting and recreational activities, family integration, contact with nature, with facilities to serve more than 5000 visitors. Thus, this space becomes the place of attraction for children, adolescents, and young people from surrounding neighborhoods in search of fun and physical activation.
With the task of complementing this offer, in the northern section of the park, where it was initially contemplated to provide arts teaching services and under the order of designing a neighborhood garden, the work team of the School of Architecture of the National Autonomous University of Mexico decided to establish a space for contemplation and interaction for different generations with recreational and sports activities, where people of different ages could perform outdoor entertainment activities; in the center of these activities would be Skating, a sport that is gaining interest among the youth of the City since in this area it has many followers and currently does not have nearby spaces to practice it.
The project was coordinated by landscape architects Valia Wright and Eduardo Peón and architect Francisco Elías, who together with urban planners, local architects, and sociologists, established as their main goal to understand the relationship between this section of the park with the surrounding neighborhood, and at the same time bring a bit of the natural context of the Chihuahua desert, as a form of recognition of the natural heritage of the zone.
The landscape of the Chihuahua desert, particularly the Samalayuca dunes is the natural reference for the conception of this space object, a continuous piece that perches on the ground and combines a skating rink with an administration building and classrooms for workshops.
The building was conceived as a cave by which the covered square and the skating rink communicate, through a portico that protects the service module, an office, and three classrooms, which overlook the lake and can be used together with the square. On the upper floor, there is a viewpoint, which can be used as an observatory and for other activities related to the skating rink. The services area highlights the cylindrical shape of the bathroom module and other architectural details that refer to the architecture of the Nomadic peoples of the zone. Finally, the shape of the portico with the triple column modules is a nod to the architecture of the 50s and 60s that characterized the urban landscape of Ciudad Juárez.
On the perimeter of the skating rink, an extension of a bike lane was built to connect with the rest of the park and parking areas, integrating La Duna Skatepark into the natural route of this recreational space. For the materialization of this space, high-tech concrete was selected to achieve a smooth and continuous surface with a color that perfectly integrates with the sand of the Chihuahua desert.
