Plaza de les Glòries

The competition of la Plaça de les Glòries (2nd phase) opens up the discussion around one of the most important and yet unsolved central areas of Barcelona. The proposals had to deal with the definition of a 15Ha of public space, 90.000m2 of housing, more than 20.000m2 of public buildings, 32.000m2 of office buildings and the redistribution of the traffic and public transport systems.

It is estimated a 30.000.000€ budget for the development of the surface of the new park/square as the principal picture of the overall area to be transformed which involves the deconstruction of the current infrastructure and the construction of a new tunnel roadway underneath the area, becoming the most significative transformation of Barcelona for the next years.


Design Concept

TERRA D’OPORTUNITATS - LAND OF CHANCES

The controversy park or square, central plain or major junction, has feed along the last decade the debate around Barcelona’s Glories Square. Imagined by Cerdà as a major centrality, at the XXI Century its position combines the desire for a major ambient quality with its metropolitan centrality and need to smooth the transition between city quarters and the 22@District at the Poblenou.

The proposal places this ambition through an intensification logic, extending the square to the 4x4 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.