ArchDaily Student Project Awards Winner Proposes Regenerative Salt Landscapes in Argentina

A team of architecture students from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba—Ezequiel López, María Victoria Echegaray, and Agustina Durandez—won an ArchDaily Student Project Award for their thesis project 'Regenerative Salt Landscapes.' The project addresses the conflict between industrial lithium extraction and ancestral land use in the Salar de Olaroz, located in Jujuy province, Argentina, within the Lithium Triangle shared with Bolivia and Chile. The region holds approximately 54% of the world's lithium reserves. The students rejected the dichotomy between extraction and preservation, proposing spatial and technical mediation to allow coexistence. Their work focused on territories peripheral to architectural discourse, using the thesis for sustained research to formulate design responses based on territorial and socioeconomic realities.