El Olimpo Of Resad By Enorme Studio

El Olimpo was a wooded wasteland on the campus of RESAD, the Royal Higher Drama School of Madrid, that the students had wanted to put to use for some time. Filled with brush, the existing terrain was almost impracticable. After several co-design sessions, the architects considered reconstructing an artificial topography that could serve both as an open-air amphitheatre for the school's diverse performances and as a public space with spectacular views over Madrid. Over the course of several days, ENORME Studio worked with more than 60 members of the university community, using more than 5,000 concrete blocks to shape a new topography and 20 red flags to create new light-and-shadow effects; the red of the flags was drawn from theatrical references. Today, El Olimpo has become a lively, colourful and joyful public space for the university. The project is a temporary, participatory landscape that transforms an unbuildable slope into a terraced gathering place. The concrete blocks are stacked into stepped banks that face the city view, doubling as seating for performances. The red flags introduce a theatrical colour note and mark the edges of the new topography against the trees. Built quickly and cheaply with the direct involvement of students and staff, El Olimpo demonstrates how a university campus can generate its own public space through a short, collaborative design action rather than a conventional capital project. It is a model of how a wasteland can be converted into a civic room in days rather than years.