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Architects: EBBA ARCHITECTS
- Area: 600 m²
- Year: 2019
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Photographs:Josema Cutillas, Benni Allan
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Manufacturers: Garnica Plywood
Text description provided by the architects. The project starts with the act of placing a column in a space to help rationalise and give a new order to the square, as a way of acknowledging the qualities while trying to transform the use of the public realm. This project is a continuation of EBBA’s fascination in the ideas and use of rudimentary architectural elements and their interest in creating simple yet elegant interventions that explore proportion, form and construction techniques. Their practice focuses on the making of buildings, places and objects that are socially and materially driven, with completed projects in the arts, fashion, gallery exhibition, public realm, residential and educational sectors.
The city of Logroño, known for its historic buildings and reputable churches, is part of the trail on the ‘Camino de Santiago’, a pilgrimage route leading from the French border across the north of Spain. A city made up of streets and patios helps to create a sense of urban rooms at different scales, all lined with colonnades that are carried by columns which both define and provide unique edge conditions. This intervention takes the idea of the column as a device, and the understanding of it being integral to the way the spaces in this city are formed, as a starting point.
Responding to quite a complicated site this project gives the square a new order through a very simple intervention. The placement of a single column can help to demarcate and create an enclosure, as well as anchor and make new space around it. This project proposed to transform the square by adding columns by way of offering new configurations that could be re-arranged. The project suggests a playful way of activating the space that could allow the various local festivities to happen within the sea of columns. As a simple gesture, the columns were designed to be reorganised, to create new rooms within this urban room, while at night they transformed into light beacons to give the square a new life and a totally different experience in the city.
Responding to quite a complicated site this project gives the square a new order through a very simple intervention. The placement of a single column can help to demarcate and create an enclosure, as well as anchor and make new space around it. This project proposed to transform the square by adding columns by way of offering new configurations that could be re-arranged. The project suggests a playful way of activating the space that could allow the various local festivities to happen within the sea of columns. As a simple gesture, the columns were designed to be reorganised, to create new rooms within this urban room, while at night they transformed into light beacons to give the square a new life and a totally different experience in the city.
While the project sought to create an impactful intervention for the Concéntrico Festival, EBBA made a conscious decision to create the columns in the simplest way and from the least amount of material possible. As part of the competition winning scheme, the project required to be constructed entirely from a new plywood sheet material. The skeletal form allowed the figure of the column to be represented with the smallest means, with its tectonic assembly able to be put together easily by a small team of the studio.
