Lenguaje

BEAR (Ane Arce, Iñigo Berasategui)

The Street in 10 Years

Cities are places, cities are people, people build stories that tie places to their time and space. Here is an imagined story about a present and a future of the Glorieta of a Doctor in love with flowers.

The tree that wanted to be order

In the times of handheld technologies and life screens, a large square full of banana trees and its surrounding streets are shown crouched behind parked vehicles. The Círculo Logroñés, a noble cultural institution, hopes that its gaze will be ordered and find in that front a suitable interlocutor with whom to restore the splendour of its surroundings.
Machado said that everything that is not folklore is pedantry and I don’t know if we could add that a handful of trees are not a square either. This is where our first protagonists land: can a proposal that is only language change its surroundings?

The challenge is enormous: how to overcome the asphalt, the cars, the signs and the noise, how to overcome the language of the car and the infrastructure and bring the street closer to its condition as a place? To rethink the street is also to understand that temporality is its great ally: what sense does it make to shape the space for permanent uses when, through timetables and management, we can have all of them?

ACT 1 (Concéntrico) a great interior

Let us imagine a square that is nothing but a “great interior”, a domestic landscape enclosed by a boundary.

This first act is thus the construction of a border. The disguise of the column with which the trees on the edge of the Glorieta are disguised as a column seeks a double message: on the one hand, the symbol, the beginning of a story, the introduction of architectural language over nature. The museum is a street in order to re-signify with a simple gesture what happens behind it. On the other hand, to create a peristyle, a limit, a perimeter with which to delimit an interior whose rules are yet to be written.

By inserting this soft corpus of classical order on the trees, we turn them into architecture. By differentiating the perimeter rows of the square, we create a mark in the excessive mass of trees and launch a differentiated response to the surroundings. The creation of a call to transgress that threshold, to re-signify its interior.

Second ACT liberation of captive objects

The immobile furniture in cities is not only an etymological paradox, but also a limitation in use and enjoyment.

The second action proposed to be carried out during the festival is the mechanical action of unscrewing the benches and furniture in Doctor Zubía Square. A simple act that allows the free association and use of them throughout this new public interior, where the user overcomes his or her Debordian condition of spectator to become the protagonist of the space, and once again the space.

Third act a roof and a timetable

the idea behind the festival is the spatial consolidation of the assault. the fleeting plastic idea of the colonnade must be spatially fixed. for that, this third act seeks to build an open infrastructure that recognises this perimeter and configures it through a simple system of cables and catenaries that make possible its roof, lighting or time control. a rhythmic, simple and open metallic structure that consolidates the roundabout as that interior, always harbours its indeterminate potentiality and responds architecturally to its surroundings. In this way, a friendlier urban scale is defined in the interior of the square, an enclosed paradise that tries to trap the human structure of Logroño. The architectural response towards the edges of the roundabout helps the institutional buildings, such as the Círculo Logroñés, by highlighting their monumental character and incorporating them into the map of everyday perceptions.

The interior space acquires the potential for encounters, that which is constitutive of life in cities, ensuring urban appropriation and the consolidation of public spaces through the construction of urban scenarios.

Fourth ACT erasure and de-specialisation (Van Eyck’s snow)

Van Eyck’s snowy street is the celebration of a paradigm shift; it is the path of erasure and de-specialisation. A rupture between urban design and function.

Acknowledging the city also implies fostering its necessarily ambiguous and free condition. To remove the pavement is to erase the prophylactic layer of road specialisation that denies the structural needs of the ground. The de-paving with Albero earth takes up a traditional urban image, providing the street with draining pavements without the need to move the existing levels. The absorbent soil manages the filtering of rainwater into the ground, without adding water flow to the rainwater network. In addition to being low-maintenance, these historic flooring configurations are able to reduce the heat island effect.

In this proposal for the city of Logroño, we are interested in building bridges over abysses, confronting nature and architecture. By recomposing limits, creating interiors and erasing traces.

FINAL ACT. Contagion and replication

Once the central space of the Glorieta del Doctor Zubia has been re-inhabited, we propose a final act of overcoming the limits where the infrastructural erasure spreads to the surroundings. To extend the footprint of the intervention, we propose to establish a permeable block between the section of Duquesa de la Victoria street from the Glorieta del Doctor Zubía to Avenida de Colón, redirecting the flow of vehicular traffic towards Avenida de la Paz, where it is possible to generate a perimeter route by means of small interventions that allow the pedestrian route to predominate.