Garden in the Park  - Spain 
Cristina Parreño

Biography 

Cristina Parreño Alonso is a licensed architect in Spain and UK, with ten years of professional experience working in Madrid and London. She holds a Masters and Bachelor degree in Architecture and Civil Engineering from the University of Madrid, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura (ETSAM) where she graduated with honors. 

She started her professional career in Madrid. Later she moved to London and joined Foreign Office Architects (FOA), where, as project director she was responsible for a number of projects in Spain and UK for several years.

Since 2009, she has been working on her own practice and teaching at various architecture universities. She has taught design studio at the University of Western Australia, at the State University of New York at Buffalo and she currently teaches graduate and undergraduate design studios at MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

She has won several architectural competitions, among others, the 1st prize for the Urban Rehabilitation of the Business complex AZCA in Madrid, award for the Housing Competition for Young Architects J5 in Andalusia and Honorable Mention for the National Library of Slovenia. Her work has been published in newspapers like El País and El Mundo and in several architectural magazines like Quaderns, Via Arquitectura and Arquitectura COAM.

Garden in the Park 

The main challenge of this project was the design of two distinct programs: a library and a museum. Two different buildings that could be integrated with each other and with the existing Taichung Gate Park, creating a sense of cultural identity for the city. Our answer to the brief was the utilization of a group of rings that would became the architectural generator of the project, setting the strategy for the separation and connection of two distinct programs, for the reinvention of two different institutions into a new building typology and for the integration of the project with the circulation of the existing park. The figure eight becomes a distinguished feature of the project which strong symbolic meaning in ancient China accompanies its other more pragmatic side as an efficient circulation system that allows the coexistence of two distinct typologies.

---