Plaça de les Glories - Land of Chances
International competition for the Glorias Square at Barcelona - 2014
Special mention of the Jury – 2º position
Authors: Joan M. Viader, Josep Fuses, Jorge Perea, Jordi Mansilla, Michel Desvigne
Collaborators: Amado Martín, Samuel Llovet
Toon de Keyser, Ferran Montoya, Lluís Bellera
Toni Nortes, Ana Turull
The proposal places this ambition through an intensification logic, extending the square to the 4×4 Cerdà blocks and entangling side activities and city quarters by maximizing its contact and hybridizing its borders.
The central space overrides the notion of leisure space to attain a major collective sense. At north, a metropolitan creation cluster (35.000sqm), stresses the uses along the space in connection with the Design Hub and the intermodal node at the centre. The collective appropriation by users and activities is the major key in the ground definition, providing a metropolitan central sense, overriding the XIX century subdivision in walking paths and green areas and becoming indeterminate in its very nature. Upon the continuous transitive soil, programmatic opportunities happen by relationships of proximity and distance, hardness and softness, light and shadow or enclosure and openness, melting continuously and allowing users to set specific purpose to the space. A big prefabricated concrete slab adds stiffness creating hard places by its accumulation and dispersal. One thousand landscapes within the single unity.
Re-naturalization reached without reproduction: A powerful system of hydro-channels organizes the water management, the underground delayed infiltration and areas of increased humidity as a closed ecosystem. Pedestrian flows are intensified at city level by the major avenues which cross as absences and cuts, new transversal diagonals linking quarters and the west-east movement pattern in coherence with the Cerdà grid and the water system. Between geography and detail, avoiding the self referred scale, lays the project.
At the centre, the interchange between transport modes, the arrival of people and public activities marks the space. The mutual perception of travellers, pedestrians accessing the square and the next buildings, will deliver the true prominence to the space.
