What is included in a resort island masterplan concept

A resort island masterplan concept, as Lex te Loo Architects produces it, contains a delta and seasonal reading of the site, a four-step spatial diagram, a function zoning plan with an area schedule per use, circulation diagrams for road, water and pedestrian, microclimate studies built around solstice diagrams for 21 June, 21 September and 21 December, an ecosystem cross-section, a planting strategy keyed to soil conditions, and a sequence of renders. In our Astrakhan Hills project for Proletarsky Island on the Volga, this package was compiled into an eighteen-page jury brochure for a thirty-hectare island twenty minutes from the historic Astrakhan Kremlin. What a concept must prove before form is fixed A concept must prove that the client knows what they will actually build before any budget is spent on the next stages. That means program, area, circulation, climate, ecosystem and economics all have to converge in a single document, and they all have to follow from one spatial idea rather than sit as a set of independent decisions. In Astrakhan Hills, the concept was assembled as an eighteen-page brochure for the jury of an open architectural competition, and every part of it existed to answer one specific question about the future of the island. A concept is not a presentation. It is the document on which an investment decision can be made. Reading the site: climate, seasonality, economy, culture The first thing a concept contains is an explicit reading of the site as a system of forces. For Astrakhan Hills this meant: the delta topography of the lower Volga with its lakes, dunes, Baer hillocks and channels; the industrial economy of Astrakhan, built on natural gas, sulphur, oil products, shipbuilding and fishing; a geographic position that gives the city an under-realised tourism potential; and the island opposite the historic Kremlin as the unrevealed pearl of that condition. To the reading of place, the concept adds a reading of the seasonal regime. In spring, when the Volga rises, Proletarsky Island is almost entirely submerged. In summer it returns as a thirty-hectare oasis. The eastern wind is a strong year-round force, particularly in winter. Groundwater sits at -25 metres and the soil is saline. Without that reading, every form decision after it becomes arbitrary. A four-step spatial diagram as the core of the concept A concept must show one clear move from which everything else grows. In Astrakhan Hills that move was the refusal of the conventional figure of buildings-on-a-site, and a switch to working with the relief of the island itself as the primary architectural material. It is fixed in the four-step axonometric diagram on page seven of the brochure. Step one: scale the existing relief up to the volume needed for the full program. Step two: cut a grid of canyon-streets through the resulting mass to bring daylight, views, water access and a sheltered microclimate inside the depth of the island. Step three: leave the residual hills