We may not be far from the day that planners, designers, development promoters, and other professionals recognize the fact that the space between buildings is as important to the life of the urban human being as the buildings themselves, and act accordingly.
Serge Chermayeff, Christopher Alexander. 1963
As if it were the last piece of a puzzle, the site proposed by the competition, located between the Canyelles neighborhoods (the last built polygon in the city and Roquetes, and a clear example of a self-built neighborhood) and the Collserola mountain and the Ronda de Dalt, presents an empty, underused, unstructured, and unfinished aspect, where the original topography has been mutilated by several urban operations. It does not have an “urban” character that links it to other sectors of Barcelona, nor does it have a rural character, just scars of what it once was.
This condition, far from being a problem, appears as an opportunity that allows us to move away from traditional regulations and reinvent other possibilities that, even complying with the buildable parameters, occupied surfaces and built volumes, are dissociated from the façade alignments, the block typologies and of spaces designed in the form of squares and civilized gardens.
In order to reconstruct the void between two places that have opposite densities, such as a landscape of towers and a football field, we propose to materialize the discontinuity: as opposed to concentrating the entire required housing program in a single building, we opt for the strategy of spatial atomization of the volume to be built, turning the site into an isotropic landscape with isomorphic qualities both in its built-up spaces and in its voids.
The masía, a typical construction of the Catalan landscape reserved -almost exclusively- for the rural world and the farmlands and that used to be a part of the Nou Barris district, is taken as a reference, not only formally but also conceptually, rescuing all the important aspects for its establishment: construction system, orientation, and production.
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