Fuente urbana
Un Parell d’Arquitectes
Plaza de San Agustín – Concéntrico 09
The fountain was the last link in the art of taming water and bringing it into the city, before it reached the tap in the house. It was a symbol of urbanity. It was the culmination of a complex system of regulation, collection and distribution. Before being reduced to an element of urban furniture, the fountain was architecture.
An architecture, recurrently lavish, which played a decisive role in the urban configuration and had the capacity to build a place of meeting and social relations. An ephemeral fountain reconfigures the crossroads between the Plaza de San Agustín and Calle Portales. It encloses the hall presided over by the baroque façade of the Palacio de Espartero and bordered by the Palacio de Correos with its pair of towers. At the same time, it recognises this intersection of Calle Portales as a small square, adding a vertical element between the bell tower of the church of Santa María de la Redond and the chimney of the old Tabacalera.
Its quadruped geometry outlines four ornamented concave facades. On each of them, a still life of animals, objects and figures, builds an altarpiece where water, reflections and sound stimulate the exercise of contemplation in the public space and alter the atmosphere of the place.
Un Parell d’Arquitectes
Un Parell d’Arquitectes is an architectural studio run by Eduard Callís and Guillem Moliner from the city of Olot, on a ground floor open to the street.
Relational thinking characterises the team’s projects, which are a meeting place between opposing worlds and scales. They favour exchanges between infrastructure and decoration, between the domestic sphere and the public space, between the city and the garden. They construct radiant scenarios, capable of activating activity, of narrating a new story attentive to real life and of creating an atmosphere through their characteristics of space, symbolism, materiality and light. They explore the timeless values of architecture.
The studio’s work has been published internationally and exhibited in different biennials and art galleries. It has received the FAD, Ibero-American Biennial and Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism awards, the Simon Living Places Award and the Girona Architecture Prize, as well as being a finalist in the European Aw ard for Architectural Heritage Intervention, AR Emerging Awards, the European Prize for Urban Public Space and the Enor Prize, among others.
Eduard Callís holds a doctorate in architecture from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) with the thesis “Architecture of the citizens in Spain” and lectures on projects and master’s degrees at the Barcelona School of Architecture. Guillem Moliner is an architect from the UPC, guest lecturer at the Cardenal Herrera University in Valencia and lecturer at the University of Girona and the Olot School of Art.