Together with Isabel Gómez García (architect) and Javier Serrano Fajardo (architect)
Location: Marbella, Spain
Status: Competition. MATIMEX FIRST PRIZE. A jury composed by Enric Batllè, Lucía Ferrater, Diego Gronda, Marguerita Caldeira, Juan Luis Grafula, Josep Piñot and Federica Minozzi, awarded Plaza Sostenible with the First Prize in the PIAM international competition. More info: Here
Year: 2018
Why a market?
A market is a public square (in Spanish plaza and square are synonyms) A building that is trying no to be a building.
A market functions as an urban space.
A market is a place defined by the interactions that take place in it: political, monetary, social or of competition
A market is a place in which public and private merge. It is simultaneously a domestic space and a place of representation.
In cities tending to individuality, the notion of a daily market in which locals and tourists interact is increasingly gaining relevance. The double-sensed title of the project: “Sustainable Plaza” plays with the dichotomy of shopping malls and traditinal market. Oxford dictionary defines “Plaza” as: 1. A public square, marketplace, or similar open space in a built-up are; and 2. Shopping mall. Let’s go back to the first meaning!.
A square-shaped building
Sustainable plaza proposes a building trying to release from its built condition, in order to put behind most of modern movement impositions and to embrace definitely the ecological challenges of our era. The building is conceived as a space open to the surroundings, as it is ruled by concepts usually used for urban proposals, rather than by typological approaches.
A square-shaped building in the sense of a building like a public square.
Sustainable Plaza is, thus, proposing a building that is putting behind the paradigm of the modern movement to finally embrace the challenge of sustainability. Shapes respond to solar angles, specific for each latitude, so, as Glenn Murcutt would say, architecture and shape emerge as something completely anchored in its context. A reactive roof turns, so, into the most significant façade of the building.
The proposal was clearly inspired by the tradition of industrial construction technique, from which it takes the idea of seriation, standardization and versatility. The skylighted roofs of the old markets and their powerful geometry was a clear influence. But sustainable plaza also brings back the notion of space that the classical market buildings proposed in the 19th century, with its high ceilings and open layouts, its dis-hierarchization and its isotropic program conception.
These historical references were overlapped with the idea of the society of information and the new retail typologies it created, proposing new socialization areas, flexible horizontal work organizations and a certain indetermination of use towards a new form of versatility.
