Floods swept through Valencia in 1957, destroying parts of the city and its bridges. After this, the river Thuria was diverted and now a 7-kilometre strip of land lies in its place, cutting across the city fabric as a park. The dry riverbed stretching towards the sea has been the site of many proposals, including an unbuilt highway, and Santiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences, now nearing completion.

Each student had to identify an individual critical position towards the site and develop cinematic architectures specific to the city’s memory and fast-growing future. This process is best described in a quote from Walter Benjamin’s  Reflections.

Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach the buried past must conduct like a man digging. This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand-like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery – in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding ….

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