Tobogan House

Madrid

2016

The Tobogan House is at once carbon sinks and oxygen wells, self-regulated by natural grass archives and the ecosystems they support. It is placed at the landscape of the south of Monte del El Pardo, where extensive suburbanization on land and meadows has eradicated the ecosystem of natural grasses in exchange for asphalt extensions and monospecies herbaceous patches. To maintain the monospecies lawns, these patches are fumigated with glyphosate-based herbicides. This toxified ecological simplification displaces thousands of insects and herb types that keep food webs in balance while providing the nutrition of approximately a third of the species of birds, reptiles, amphibians, and bats equally necessary for this ecosystem stewardship. Acting as a guerrilla gardening project, this archive is a point of resistance against monochrome gardening and its ecosystem impacts. The garden releases pollen, seeds, and spores that travel through the air or attach to flying insects to replicate in the surrounding environment. The natural grass archive as the carbon sink of the house is entangled with the growth of its companion multispecies communities of macro and microscopic life forms: arachnids, myriapods, and hexapods that inhabit the soil and air of the Community of Madrid.

2016 - The Architectural Review awarded The Tobogan House with the Emerging Architecture Nomine AREA

“Z4A responded to an exacting brief by creating a house in Madrid that is out of this world”

2016 - Simon Mies Award

2018 - SARCH, Venice, jury - Toyo Ito, Will Alsop, Mats Ove Froserud, Leo van Shaik, Zaha Hadid group, Gabriel Kozlowski.

2019 - ACSA - Faculty Design Award

2019 - Architecture Master Prize