LA VENTANA AL MAR

San Juan, Puerto Rico

The character of the city of San Juan, Puerto Rico is, to a great extent, defined by the relationship between land and water, city and ocean. Since the turn of the 20th century, private real estate developments have claimed the city’s waterfront edge. Public perception of the oceanfront as a collective public amenity has been all but lost behind a massive urban wall that stretches along miles of waterfront. At the core of El Condado’s hotel district, a large-scale public space intervention, La Ventana al Mar, reclaims the water’s edge for public use, reconnects the city and the ocean, and has served as an effective instrument of physical and economic revitalization for the area.

 The government-owned land parcel, was originally occupied by a large dysfunctional Convention Centre built in the 1970’s, flanked by two landmark hotels – the ‘Condado Vanderbilt’ (1919, Warren & Wetmore Architects), and the ‘La Concha’ Hotel (1958, Toro Ferrer Architects), one of the jewels of Puerto Rico’s tropical modernism. By the late 1990’s, the Convention Centre and the two hotels had closed and the government parcels were marked for redevelopment. This stirred a heated public debate between developers proposing the construction of a new “all-exclusive” Mediterranean style resort hotel on the three sites (thus perpetuating the urban wall), and advocates for the rehabilitation of the hotels and the construction of a new public space that would open the city to the ocean. Through civic involvement combined with advocacy by the College of Architects and the Municipality of San Juan, the proponents of the public space and the preservation of the La Concha and Vanderbilt hotels prevailed. 

 La Ventana al Mar, “a window to the sea”, is the built resolution of this conflict. Here the metaphor of the “closed wall” is replaced by the metaphor of the “open window”. Utilising design strategies that operate at the larger collective scale of the landscape and the city to the intimate scale of the individual user, the project reflects the power of urban design and public space to positively transform deteriorated environments through the creation of habitable places of openness and inclusion.