Architects: Ignacio Martínez Molina + Hector Nevot LLoret
Structures: José Luis Gutiérrez López
Photographs: MV
Location: Monzón, Huesca
Surface area: 820 m2
Builder: Binaced
Customer: Monzón City Council
2015
The main objective of the City Council was to urbanize this space as a small sports court, but we thought it was an opportunity to make this free space suitable for other uses besides sports. The challenge was to make them compatible. We changed the starting point of the project by understanding this space as a small square for the neighborhood where sports activities could take place and not the other way around.
The next problem was how to make a square in an undefined urban environment, in an urban periphery where buildings and sidewalks are not delimited and are diluted until they blend in with the surrounding plots. The idea was not to urbanize an existing public space, in one form or another, but to create it in the middle of nowhere.
The decision was more conceptual than formal. We concluded that the way to define this square, this urban space, was to provide it with a limit that the environment does not provide. Define a void by defining its limit, its edge.
This resulted in an elevated platform where its thick, habitable boundary is made of three combined elements; walls, benches and flowerbeds, forming an identifiable perimeter border, inviting people to sit on it, leaving the center empty, allowing it to be used for a party, a dance, a flea market, etc.
The square has been provided with the characteristic surrounding trees that give its name to the neighborhood, based on holm oaks. It is proposed to plant four specimens, one of them larger, with the intention of recovering the element that gives its name to the neighborhood. The project also includes the planting of three hackberry trees as a screen to cover the rear façade of the service station.