The program required the inclusion of a series of very diverse activities on an block of houses in the Eixample, truncated by the intersection of Ribes Street and some existing buildings that had not followed the criteria of building in a certain direction. The project aims to completely rebuild the boundaries of the block of houses and create its own topology. A new square is being created along Ribes Street, which will serve as an access point and reference point for the entire civic centre. From this square you can access the market, the library, the nursery and the civic centre, which are looking for a place in the open spaces of the block of houses, without losing the connection with the square. The student residence and the geriatric residence form a separate body, with access via Sardenya Street, although it folds over itself in order to participate in the space generated by the square. The order of Ribes Street and the new square set out a clear criterion for the location of each part.
The Eixample block located between Sicília, Sardenya, Ali-Bei and Ausiàs March streets has an irregular geometry as a result of its division into two parts along Ribes Street. On the block there is a linear building destined for a Civic Centre, which occupies the main part of it, with a different criterion from the construction system that determines the Eixample’s morphology. The initial arrangement provided for the implementation of other facilities adjacent to this initial and a ground floor building plus five floors with a façade on Sardenya Street does in fact follow the construction criteria of the Eixample Cerdà.
The planned program of facilities around the Civic Centre was a library (which was to share services with the Civic Centre), a Kindergarten, a Primary School, and a Market. In addition, the ground floor building plus five floors facing Sardenya Street was divided into two, one intended for a student residence, privately managed, and another in a Geriatric Residence built by a private Foundation and later handed over to the City Council.
So that the problem to be solved added an atypical boundary geometry in relation to the one defined in the Eixample, inside there was a singular building impossible to "Digest" if the district’s construction criteria were applied, a limit (Sardenya Street) that did meet these criteria and a radically heterogeneous program in terms of the different types of buildings it generated. And an immediate observation when proposing the most obvious solution (building the boundary, as in the whole of the Eixample): the m2 buildable foreseen in the initial arrangement did not give much to extend to these limits the type planned construction in relation to Sardenya Street.
The solution has needed an extreme degree of artificiality and violence in the proposal, to establish common relationships between geometries, building types and radically heterogeneous uses. Basically, the planning criterion has been to ironically subordinate all the buildings to their dependence on Ribes Street (which is being extended in the central section to generate an autonomous, static, square space).
This desire has led us to "plasticise" the geometry of the Geriatric Residence to bend and face this public space, to link (and magnify) all the entrances to this same public space and to work with project instruments that solve the specificities of each use and express their scale (so different between, say, a market and a daycare centre) and at the same time determine common volumetric and material relationships between such a different grouping of buildings.
That is, in the first case, almost domestic architectural instruments; in the second, almost sculptural.
