The students of the 5th year of the Architecture School of the University of Navarra are visiting Muimenta today with the support of Fundación RIA, to develop an academic project of reactivation and rehabilitation in the village of the municipality of Carballeda de Avia, in Ourense.
Working with the Architectural Projects department of the UNAV and with the guest professor Fermín Vázquez and the professor José Ángel Medina Murua, the 5th year students will develop the project of three buildings on three independent plots with residential uses, facilities for productive use, equipment and public space. This work will be developed during the first semester of this academic year and will end with an exhibition of the projects.
The scope of the project will be developed in Muimenta, one of the 21 rural villages integrated in the Model Villages strategy and in which RIA participates by developing its revitalisation plan. This instrument is promoted by the Xunta de Galicia under the Law of recovery of agricultural land (2021) to test, through strategies and pilot projects, different methodologies that allow to foresee a positive tendency shift in the dynamics that affect the Galician rural areas and many other European regions.
Taking into consideration the great challenges of sustainability, both environmental, economic and social, that our society faces in the European context, the academic programme takes the Galician countryside as its working environment in order to address its problems in a comprehensive manner. Transversal topics addressed in the exercise are depopulation, management of built heritage, economic opportunities, agroforestry production with local origins, biodiversity loss, sustainable forest management, forest fires, abandonment of productive land, management of the water cycle, energy sustainability, etc.
