BA Rioparque

Buenos Aires turned its back on its river for a century. The former Ciudad Deportiva site sat empty for three decades, in plain view, at the one point where the city could finally reach the water. The national ideas competition Buenos Aires and River put that void up for debate. On 15 March 2023 the jury announced WEST 8 + PALO arq as the winning team.

The proposal works through four operations: connecting, activating, recovering and educating. It does not propose a park on neutral ground. It reads an edge that already holds memory, relics and biodiversity of its own — one that needs revaluing rather than replacing.

The site presents three edge conditions — the canal, the floodplains and the open river — and those three conditions generate the park's three areas: The Meadow and the Garden of Relics, the Phyto-Remediation Archipelago and the Southern Lookout. The park is not an object set down on the coast. It is a graded piece of green infrastructure that transitions from city to water, changing character along the way.

Across the wetlands, an elevated system and floating platforms follow the rising and falling tides instead of resisting them. There the park stops being scenery and becomes working ecological infrastructure, with birds and riparian vegetation as part of the program.

The jury found that, once completed, the project would create an exceptional urban park and a true arrival point to the river, praising its reading of the site’s ecosystems, its treatment of the wetlands, and its approach to green and blue infrastructure.

Jury statement, Buenos Aires and River national ideas competition