An excellent work of graphic craft and construction serves here as the basis for a painstakingly executed project for a public square, providing it with the desired starring role in a space of unstructured characteristics.
Penedès square forms part of the interior of the city block Cerdanyola 2000, a district of around 600 homes designed in the 1980s. This district, comprising two mega-islands, is surrounded by prefab blocks of ground floor plus 8 storeys. The sparsely populated, fragmented city block interiors, with a mixed use of communal parking and an urban green space, have little social activity and no retail activity at all.
The new development of the square transforms this cheerless setting between blocks into a place with identity for the neighbours. It is rehabilitated as a public space for sociability.
A carpet, in our quotidian imagery, symbolises a meeting place, a place of welcome, of sharing, which the community quickly appropriates and identifies with. The carpets, formed from the different cultures that coexist in the neighbourhood, interlink here with the aim of forming a unique cultural mosaic.
Traditional, low-cost ceramic materials were used in the plaza. In an act of solidarity, the investment allocated to the works went mostly to the manpower, as it was undertaken at a time of strong economic crisis. Personal work increases the self-esteem of the operators executing the square, they identify individually and collective with the works and become the stars of this precision craft which interlinks the plastic requirements with the complex geometry of the architectural outlines.
One of the project’s technical challenges required addressing the problems of an obsolete drain as well as the virtually non-existent accessibility to all the block entrances before the intervention. The simplicity of a 4% sloping plane succeeds in resolving these issues.
