Luis Ybarra and José María de Cárdenas: “At EDDEA we shape cities, create communities and build homes”
EDDEA’s founding partners, Luis Ybarra and José María de Cárdenas, were guest speakers at the ninth edition of the ‘Referentes’ series, an event organised by Abbantia Law Firm and Clínica Cuve, where they reviewed the studio’s main milestones and stressed that “what sets us apart most” is that “we shape cities, create communities and build homes”.
During their talk, Ybarra and De Cárdenas noted that “we are a somewhat complex architecture, urban planning and strategic planning studio, and this phrase sums up the range of scales in our work – city, neighbourhood, home – which we have been developing over more than 30 years, both in Spain and abroad”.
At the scale of cities, they highlighted work in Morocco aimed at planning the future of several regions, where four economic and territorial development plans with a 20-year horizon are currently being drawn up. “We have learnt to work with administrations very different from our own and, above all, to work with local communities,” said De Cárdenas.
They also pointed to the project designed in Taiwan for a cultural and entrepreneurship complex, with an investment of more than 130 million euros. “There are highly competitive societies that plan with vision and efficiency. In this case, more than a decade ago they began to correct their economic model, shifting from heavy industry to culture and leisure,” said Ybarra.
New neighbourhoods
At the scale of communities, the EDDEA partners recalled the delivery of a new neighbourhood in Moscow with 5,500 homes. As a distinctive feature of the project, José María de Cárdenas noted that “it was the first time a series of European-style residential blocks had been built on a mass scale, something that has been warmly welcomed by the city and by the thousands of new families”.
Another large-scale project the studio is currently developing is the design of the Port Urban District (Distrito Urbano Portuario, DUP) in Seville, which will open more than two kilometres of the Guadalquivir riverbank to the city. Promoted by the Port Authority of Seville, the project is, according to the EDDEA partners, “an example of public participation, co-design and the recovery of historic heritage”.
Finally, at the scale of the home, Luis Ybarra highlighted the construction of the Forestier residential block in Seville, “the one that best represents us”, while José María de Cárdenas emphasised that “we have left a modular platform up and running in Russia with which more than 8,000 affordable homes have already been built. We are obsessed with industrialisation”.
The ‘Referentes’ series
Launched two years ago, the ‘Referentes’ series sets out to recognise people and institutions whose contributions in diverse fields help to improve society. The session with EDDEA’s co-founders in Seville brought together business leaders, executives and professionals from a range of sectors.
Other figures who have taken part in the forum include the Swedish ambassador to Spain, Teppo Tauriainen; the chairman of Grupo Tecnológica, Fernando Franco; the creator of the famous ‘García Millán’ gazpacho, Luis García Millán; the managing director of the Fundación Addeco, Francisco Mesonero; the president of the Observatory against Gender Violence of the General Council of the Judiciary, María Ángeles Carmona; the president of the European Association for Endoscopic Surgery, Salvador Morales; the managing director of Atalaya Riotinto Minning, Enrique Delgado; and the Andalusian Government’s secretary general for External Action, Enric Millo.