The project was an opportunity to return to the neighbourhood in an interested way; it was no longer a playful visit, a discovery of its people, its bars, its aroma... but rather a revision of the place with the desire to identify what would allow us to reveal its qualities and being able to describe it in a precise way about a project.
An attempt, in short, to want to explain a reality, to offer a new and more complete meaning to an architectural project, beyond solving a program, a commission.
In the market’s public tender, we already made a collage with some fish by César Manrique, some drawings for children that could contain and explain the joy of these people, their liveliness, their energy, their enthusiasm and, often, many difficulties.
The market has always been an element of the neighbourhood’s social cohesion, a reference, sometimes almost secret and only visible to its inhabitants. This condition of density that the market has in relation to the city must have been a condition of the project, so that the building and its immediate surroundings really became a clear point of reference for this small part of the city of Barcelona.
It is amazing to see now the photos we took of the market during construction, when the pieces, the bones of this huge animal, were being transported through the streets to their final place. It’s nice to think of the memory of these pieces being transported along the same streets; as a neighbour, a witness in the same way of the building, or at least, some fragment of the market.
