Projects

Lund Cathedral, which has been the moral, cultural and social engine of Lund through the centuries, has decided to undertake a new extension of the city on its own land in Råängen, an agricultural area of farms and cultivation on the northeast outskirts of this town. From the beginning, the Cathedral surrounded itself with a team of collaborators who could guide it through this process: a local architecture studio to propose a master plan and manage relations with the administration; an economist to assist in the viability of the project; a curator of art for the content and agenda of objectives to be achieved… A slow and very careful process that began in 2018 proposed a series of actions to announce the project to the local community. Finally, in December 2019, an international competition chose Flores & Prats as the team that would create the first residential buildings for the site. The commission is to build a new community, thinking about the first buildings and inhabitants that will occupy this place and how will they relate with this very special context. These first inhabitants will be pioneers facing the challenges of our times – the climate emergency, our relationship to nature, the need for genuine inclusivity, and changes to our living and working patterns post-Covid.

A Tower and a Corner
The first building proposed is a Tower, and has been thought as a companion to Hage: a closed garden designed and built by Norwegian architects Brendeland + Kristoffersen in the early steps of Råängen’s story. The Tower has a very close relationship to Hage and contains a program in ground floor which is an extension of the activities of the closed garden: a Kitchen with a common room to meet, gather, eat and cook. The height of this space is enough to completely incorporate Hage in its interior; one can feel that the garden and its elements could get into the kitchen space, which we represent with a colour drawing.

Next to the Tower, we draw a lower, horizontal building organizing a corner, able to serve as a standard volume for the other buildings that will follow this first implantation. This Corner building defines, together with the Tower, the central Square of the future community. This Square contains all the outdoor activities of the buildings around it, and it also works as an extension of the public condition of Hage, connecting it with the forest nearby. We can say that the Square is the echo of Hage, its double, very similar in dimensions but containing all the uses that the more secluded condition of the Hage will not allow. If Hage is a place for encounters and orientation, with a delicate and protected nature, the Square will contain games, cycling and other activities that require more open and bolder spaces. This public realm, the one formed by Hage, the Square and the several paths that connect with the backyards, is crucial to ensure the coexistence of the neighbours, their interaction and exchange. It is important to offer not just great homes but also all the related spaces outside these, which are also their home: spaces with tension, with intensity, with different scales to stay individually or in groups… All the sequence of intermediate spaces that go from the private to the public domain should be developed with care, as these will be the ones that ensure the community to grow, making everyone to feel that they belong to a neighbourhood, to a group of people that are her / his community.

Until this moment we have been thinking via proportions, relations between the parts, the inner spaces and the open ones nearby. Rather than thinking about specific distributions of apartments, we think that we should arrive at the project through the building of the context and the culture of the place, working on the relations and articulation among things, slowly projecting the outer open spaces and its qualities towards the interiors and the living spaces.

Building Communities
The project addresses self-sustenance: the ways in which the community creates a relationship with agriculture, the surrounding land, and the future. The new community will grow not only from people living in new homes, but from the future inhabitants and the earth, the animals, the trees, the stones… all will form the community, coexisting in a horizontal relationship and trying to find an equilibrium between themselves and the specificity of this site.

The new community should incorporate the accumulated knowledge of the place, programs that are already in the area or inspired by the area: cultivation, cooking, co-working, makers, research… establishing identification with the place, incorporating all the existing agents that can be part of the ecology of the site. The edge condition of Råängen, in between city and agriculture, is its richness and a quality that should be taken advantage of, providing to this community a specific character, adding value and uniqueness. This is what we call From Land to Table: incorporating within the project the concepts of cultivation and growing from the land, creating spaces of socialization where work takes place on cultivation, processing food or meal preparation, sequences of a process where neighbours and casual visitors will be naturally invited to share and spread the culture of the site.