Restoration of Mar Manor in the age of Anthropocene.

“The crabs tried to escape through the rocks, the shrimps piled on top of one another, practically making a paste, the eels jumped, the water boiled.” That’s how Carmen Rodríguez described the disturbing sight she saw on Saturday, October 12 on the beach of San Pedro del Pinatar, in the southeastern Spanish region of Murcia.

Fish suffocating due to a lack of oxygen have come to symbolize the environmental collapse of Mar Menor, the largest saltwater lagoon in Europe.

Experts put the disaster down to the management of the land surrounding the lagoon, which itself covers 17,000 hectares. More specifically, they blame intensive farming for contaminating the soil and the groundwater with nitrates from fertilizers, which end up in the Mar Menor, causing eutrophication. This happens when there is an excessive amount of nutrients the water, provoking the growth of phytoplankton which reduces the amount of oxygen.

Solutions for the restoration of Mar Manor: To restore the lagoon we followed two strategies to reduce the phosphate and Nitrate content that flows into the lagoon.

We introduced this two-stage filtration system into a vertical structure which can process the filtration step by step by effectively removing the excess nutrients from the Drainage.

                       1. Woodchips Bioreactors: Filters the nitrates from the agriculture drainage.

Bioreactors are essentially subsurface trenches filled with a carbon source, mainly wood chips, through which water is allowed to flow just before leaving the drain to enter a surface water body. The carbon source in the trench serves as a substrate for bacteria that break down the nitrate through denitrification or other biochemical processes.

               2. Steel Byproducts: Absorbs the phosphorous content in the drainage.

The Above Drawing is a computational abstract representation of the flow of water into the lagoon.

Final Poster of De – Eutro Tower.

De-Eutro Tower is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed in the MAA01 2019/20 by Students: Ka Man Lee, Pratik Dhamale, Sumit Nemmaniwar, and Faculty: Mireia Luzárraga, Fiona Demeur.