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Alejandro Carrasco HidalgoArchitect / Researcher / Educator
PhD


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S01The Possibility of an Island

Type
Speculative Architecture

RecognitionsHonorific Mention at IE Architecture+ Award
Nominated to the Young Talent Architecture Awards (YTAA)
CreditsDrawings @Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo

Year2018





Nuevo Baztán, an industrial town founded and built by Juan de Goyeneche in the first half of the eighteenth century, was one of the paradigmatic examples of the so-called “poblados productivos”. These settlements were built ex novo to establish new industrial structures at a regional scale, bringing factories and workers’ housing together within rural territories around Madrid.

Three centuries later, we find an abandoned town, largely depopulated and overwhelmed by the surrounding residential developments that accommodate those who commute daily to Madrid. The productive and residential model proposed by Goyeneche has been radically reversed: what was once a self-contained system of production and life has become a peripheral residential settlement disconnected from the activities that originally sustained it.

Meanwhile, systems of production have undergone a profound transformation. The increasing automation of industrial activities has progressively displaced human bodies from material production, while human labour has become increasingly intellectual. The production of knowledge, sensitivities, and emotions emerges as a new productive domain, suggesting a future in which material production is increasingly detached from the human body. In this context, the intellectual worker becomes the figure of the twenty-first-century labourer. Franco “Bifo” Berardi describes this emerging social class as the cognitarians: a new form of labour whose primary productive capacity lies not in physical strength, but in the ability to generate intellectual and immaterial work.

Within this evolving productive ecosystem, the project proposes to reclaim Nuevo Baztán’s territorial isolation as a productive condition, much as Goyeneche once did. A new generation of productive structures is conceived around intellectual and creative activities—activities increasingly framed as leisure rather than work—with the aim of fostering individual and collective development.

The factory is consequently reimagined not as a place for the production of material goods, but as an infrastructure for producing knowledge, relationships, and ultimately people. It becomes a space where cognitarians can meet, exchange knowledge, and develop new forms of sensitivity and thought. Rather than reproducing the precariousness and isolation of contemporary intellectual labour, the project proposes a collective environment in which knowledge becomes a shared productive resource.

Is it possible to find an island?


Drawings @EstudioLatente 

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News!
-
01.07.2026
1st Prize - Paisaje Flotante
Competition
A Cel Obert, Tortosa, Tarragona
x EstudioLatente

01.07.2025
1st Prize - De Roca Madre
Competition
TAC! 2025 Urban Architecture Festival
x EstudioLatente



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