Public Square El Desierto

Description

We try to answer the question of how to create a public space in a place where the city does not yet exist and where the qualities of the new life have not yet settled. This occurs in a plot sweep due to deindustrialization with a dense atmosphere of sensitive memories and on which an obsolete planning lands that delimits the perimeter of our work with its rules.The answer is a creative process that combines the abstract will thought that accompanies the search for the unknown and the useful understanding of the fringes of the primitive, torn and apparently chaotic historical fabric of the place. We discovered a lint-dotted nothingness speaking of night lights, steely overhead tubes, tarred sleepers with rails, charcoal greys, and intermittent puddles interspersed with wild bushes. It is that strange amalgamation and the memory of which speaks that we try to make survive in the new landscape as a link between past and future, far from a concrete image but close to a powerful kaleidoscopic vision.In a first moment of physical confrontation we quantify each type of material that participates in that chaos, endowed however with a strange atmospheric quality caused by the presence of the hidden order of its mixture. It is these relationships of one material with another, their comparative quantitative presences that we preserve in the new space through the homogeneous distribution of each material on the plane identified with an abstract chromatic code. This is done with surface measurements that we call "urban living rooms" of approximate dimensions to those of a private living room transferred to the public space and that generate a grid of material rooms that allow various empathies between users.Without forgetting that we are in an environment of future construction with variable shadows, traffic noise, fire or visual accesses required by planning, we establish a series of behaviour standards for each material in the face of these requests of the type "if there are trucks passing by fire fighters there is no water or trees" or "if there is a visual axis there will be no trees" and so on until completing a sufficiency of orders that allow the correct behaviour of the system. Once the task of displacing the materials due to their incompatibilities has been carried out, a re-distribution appears with new mixtures such as stone and trees, water and stone, concrete and steel or wood and trees that we translate into spatial and constructive realities. In those spaces where the steel appears without mixing, the topography of the square is particularized by rising with structures that define static rooms to discover the hidden order of the place and that scribble the night along with algorithmic constellations that guide the doubtful walkers. The vegetation as part of the system acquires a second specificity with different densities, prunings, heights and colours that emphasize the degree of privacy of each urban room.The public space has been self-generated without a priori defined uses and forms a board of multiple opportunities to discover, lovers hiding in shadow rooms, old people gathered around their stories or children with their boats on the sheets of water admiring the ethereal skaters. . Perhaps it only represents the complexity of thought at the service of life.(Description provided by the architects)