PENEDÈS SQUARE
Refurbishment of Penedès Square in Cerdanyola del Vallès through geometry of ceramics.
Penedès Square is part of a block interior set of Cerdanyola 2000, a neighborhood of about 600 homes designed by the team Martorell Bohigas Mackay, in the years 80-82. This neighborhood, which consists of two mega-islands, is surrounded by prefabricated blocks of ground floor +8 floors. We met some sparsely populated and fragmented block interior, with a mixed-use urban community and green parking without any commercial or social activity.
This gloomy environment between blocks becomes a place with an identity to the neighborhood and is rehabilitated as a public and social space.
The "Rug", or "carpet", in the everyday imaginary symbolizes a meeting point, a welcome place, a conviviality space, soon the community appropriates it, identifies with it and is identified. The rugs, of different cultures that are living in the neighborhood, intertwine to form a unique cultural mosaic.
In this square, low-tech and low cost traditional materials are used. Investment toward labor is jointly conveyed at a time coinciding with a major economic crisis. Personal work increases the self-esteem of the operators that run the place, they are identified individually and collectively with the work, becoming the protagonists of this craft precision work that interlocks plastic requirements with the complex geometry of the planes.
The technical challenge of the project requires solving the problems of an obsolete drainage and the former non-existent access to all portals. A 4% inclined slope plan solves these premises.
The nondescript and anonymous landscape is recycled in its own.
The nonexistent, suddenly exists and is identified beyond its limits, but the most beautiful visual is visible from the houses that surround it. From its windows, where to lean out, a new landscape appears and the collective property proudly enjoys it. Their home is better thanks to this new landscape.
