gaSSz arquitectos Builds a Demountable Circular-Economy Garden from Rubble and Tires in Madrid's Vicálvaro

Most sustainability showcases ask you to admire a finished object. The 'Circulating' Garden for the Circular Economy Innovation Center (CIEC) in Vicálvaro, Madrid, asks a different question: what happens to the thing after it is no longer needed? gaSSz arquitectos, led by Diego García-Setién and Silvia Sánchez, answer with 2,400 m² of terraced garden built from what the site and the city already had: earth fill reshaped into platforms, demolition rubble packed into gabions, crushed tires turned into paving, and a family of yellow steel pavilions held together with bolts rather than welds.

What makes the project worth your attention is that it treats the outdoor ground of a research building as a working prototype rather than a forecourt. Composting stations, a greenhouse, a shade house over the vegetable beds, a picnic circle called the Assembly Ring and a large pergola laboratory carry the CIEC's research, teaching and outreach program across the whole plot. The garden is designed to be read, used, tested and, if necessary, taken apart. That last condition is the most radical part of the brief, and the most convincing part of the design.

A Solar Truss That Signals Its Purpose

The first thing you register is colour. A saturated yellow truss carries a row of solar panels above the gravel path, and against the brick apartment blocks and the church tower of old Vicálvaro it reads as an unmistakable piece of infrastructure. We think that legibility is deliberate. A circular economy pilot that blended politely into the neighbourhood would teach nothing; this one announces that energy is being harvested here, in public, at the scale of a walkway.

The truss also sets the structural language for everything else. Repeated triangulated frames, standard sections and visible bolted joints make the kit logic obvious. You can read how the canopy would come down simply by looking at how it went up.

PergoLab and Its Movable Platform

PergoLab, the largest structure on site, folds its steel frame into a zigzag that tilts the solar panels while sheltering a covered activity space below. Teal planter troughs line its base, and the photographs show staff tending grasses beneath the lattice, which is exactly the point: this is a laboratory roof over living material rather than a shelter over empty paving.

The detail we keep returning to is the wheeled triangular mesh stair and platform. A movable element turns a fixed pergola into an adjustable workspace for maintenance, teaching or presentations. It is a modest piece of equipment, but it expresses the project's stance better than any manifesto: the space is expected to change configuration, and the architecture provides the means.

Steel as a Trellis for Living Walls

Two of PergoLab's walls are given over to climbing plants, and the diagonal yellow members double as trellis. Look up through the struts and the vines are already threading across the steel, softening the geometry and producing dappled shade over the gravel courtyard. The structure is designed to be colonised.

This is where the 'interspecies' ambition stops being a slogan. The steel carries panels for people, foliage for insects and birds, and shade for the beds below. The question to watch over the coming seasons is how far the planting will be allowed to take over the yellow; the project will be at its strongest when the vines win.

The Assembly Ring

The Assembly Ring is the gentlest moment in the garden: a round yellow fabric canopy on slender legs above a curved slatted bench and a circular yellow floor, ringed by grasses. Under the canopy, the sun throws arched shadows across the ground, and the space reads as a clearing for picnics, workshops or informal meetings.

Its simplicity matters. A garden built around research programs needs at least one place with no task attached, where the neighbourhood can sit down without being asked to learn anything. The ring does that while staying within the same lightweight, demountable vocabulary as the rest.

Gabions, Rubble and Reshaped Ground

The terraces follow the existing topography, reworked with the site's own earth and retained by gabion walls filled with demolition rubble. Empty gabion cages enclose the plot as a fence. Gabions are hardly new, but here the choice is argued well: the fill is local waste, the cages are mechanical rather than mortared, and the walls can be emptied and refilled. The material stays in circulation instead of being locked into concrete.

The gabions also do quiet social work. They become benches, edges and planting beds, and their porous stone faces give the garden a rough, informal texture that sits comfortably against the timber-clad CIEC building and the low roofed pavilion beyond.

A Garden That Extends the Building

Across the courtyard, the teal-topped planters, pergola frames and vine-covered structures turn the whole plot into an outdoor version of the CIEC's interior rooms. The urban garden beds trial organic fertilisation and climate-adapted crops; fruit trees and pollinator species add a biodiversity layer; composting stations close the loop on green waste.

One honest caveat: crushed tire rubber is a sensible way to absorb a difficult waste stream, but rubber surfaces in planted landscapes raise fair questions about long-term wear and particle release. A pilot is precisely the right place to monitor that, and we would like to see the CIEC publish what it learns.

Plans and Drawings

The drawing set is unusually instructive. The sections of PergoLab, the compost centre, the greenhouse and the garden beds show how lightly each structure touches the ground, while the exploded axonometric separates pavilions, planting, gabions, new topography and existing plot into discrete layers, effectively a disassembly manual. The lettered isometric sheets read like a catalogue of parts.

Most telling are the material diagrams, which trace plastics, rubble, rubber, glass and scrap steel from regional factories and suppliers to the site. Here the architects map the city's waste flows as the project's true context, giving the garden an address within Madrid's metabolism as well as within Vicálvaro.

Why This Project Matters

Circular economy architecture often stalls at the level of material specification: a recycled panel here, a reclaimed brick there. The 'Circulating' Garden moves the argument to the level of the system. Structure is bolted so it can be relocated, ground is formed from on-site earth, walls are filled with rubble that can be emptied, and the program itself includes composting and recycling. The design treats public space as a temporary arrangement of resources rather than a permanent monument.

That makes it a useful precedent for municipalities with leftover plots and tight budgets. Built with Ricardo Cuevas on structure and Antonio Moreno of SYLTEC on services, the scheme is replicable, legible and frank about its own impermanence. Whether its impact really reaches the rest of Madrid will depend on whether the city copies the kit, but gaSSz have made the case clearly enough that copying it would be easy.

'Circulating' Garden for the Circular Economy Innovation Center (CIEC) by gaSSz arquitectos (Diego García-Setién, Silvia Sánchez; design team María Abad, Ainhoa Church, Mario Beltrame), Vicálvaro, Madrid, Spain. Area: 2,400 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: Emilio Parra Doiztua.

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