0308[c] Plaza Encarnacion. Seville (Spain)

International competition
2nd Prize

in 2003 we proposed, in partnership with UOB arquitectos, a solution for Seville’s central square (La Encarnación) as part of a two phase international competition that aimed solving one of the most difficult enclaves in the city.

The site had been doomed since the early 70’s, when an existing market was demolished to build a new one. The finding of pre-roman ruins and a complex political context kept the crater open and fenced for more than 30 years, becoming a familiar battleground and a reminder of the overwhelming struggle for a city living between the past and future.

Meanwhile three different competitions where held trying to unlock the situation with little success. From the last effort there was nothing left apart from the retaining wall of the crater in a precarious structural condition and an archaeological site with relative interest.

When the new competition was launched, it was obvious that it was necessary to fight the negative inertia built up during the past decades and the brief incorporated extra complexity in order to shift the center of the public debate. It included, beside a new market, an archaeological museum of the city and an “inter modal” transportation station that would connect directly with the airport. But the critical issue was, as always had been, to close the wound that divided the historical tissue between the commercial area of the south and the popular neighborhoods of the north and to articulate a new center of reference for the whole city.

Both Pedro Ojesto and I had studied in Seville’s architecture school and were very familiar with the issues, but we had both left the city years ago and had by then our own approach to face them. I suppose our backgrounds at Miralles and SOM, respectively, produced an fertile base from which the project took on. For more than 6 months we dealt with issues that would become the corner stone of our practice: morphogenetics and parametrization. Intense research and a great effort of an ever increasing team produced at the end a highly sophisticated result, but ultimately the project was about a simple thing: to bring a new perspective to and old piece of town.

The project “baked” the ground of the plaza creating a lump from which the city was seeing in a different way. A new perspective over a worn urbanscape that would bring to conscience the multilayer on which the city had been built. Under this crust there would be an air bubble that hosted the archaeological site and the inter modal station access like the belly of a huge wale. Protected from the sun and the heat the inner space allowed for multiple connections that would avoid surface traffic and create new recreation areas.

The relation between this internal space, and the worm exterior was completely integrated in a post-tensed complex structure designed with Robert Brufau and based on the work of artist Pablo Palazuelo with whom unfortunately we were unable to collaborate before his death.

A very serious effort was made to analyze the impact of sun on the plaza and in the space bellow, the light and shadow structure and the filtering systems. A program was then developed by José Ortiz to study the phasing of the growth of trees and their shadows on the public space.

The jury was a rough experience where we learn more than during the previous months of hard work. I remember with particular pleasure the presentation of Javier Saenz de Oíza and his three towers for a city that had not ask for them, and I still wish he would have gotten more credit for his clear stand about what an ideas competition should be.

We finally came second after Jürgen Mayer and his mushrooms that are now being built. I am waiting for the final result to make my opinion, but I am glad that at least they are actually accomplishing a project.

Carlos Infantes,
July 2008