The Spanish city of Almería is a place where different global systems collide and take built form. Known as “Europe‘s plastic sea”, it is the largest greenhouse in the world. Industrialized food production requires certain conditions: extraction of resources, such as water, sand and soil; cheap labor, from Romania and Africa; and corresponding habitats, from formal to informal settlements. An exploration of these different architectures – from different times, for different needs – will help to understand the systemic relations of local structures, essential to produce architectural models for the future — for Almería and beyond.

The approach to this complex landscape is with the tool of storytelling and an introduction of a fiction: Willi, a farmer from Zurich, moves to Almería with his family to start anew. What are the circumstances of his actions coming from one of Europe’s wealthiest regions? Which architecture activates in relation to the ecosystems? How will architecture develop if one does not think of architecture as managing the environment, but rather vice versa?