Passatges
1215-080.VOR-BCN.ES-2015
Architects: Vora, Estudi08014
Client: Àrea metropolitana de Barcelona
Status: Competition (2015)
Clasification: 1 prize
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Coordinates: 41.354663,2.1133213
Climate: Temperate, Mediterranean
Material: Metal
Environment: Railway
Visualizer: Studio
Scale: Large
Types: Bridge, Masterplan, Public space, Refurbishment

We propose to unify the neighborhoods Bellvitge and Gornal currently separated by the railway tracks taking the existing bridges as the main items of the intervention by transforming them into versatile infrastructures able to accommodate uses, turning them into streets and recycling them into buildings.

The cross-connectivity is based on two strategies: on the one hand creating civic routes by pedestrianization and pacification and on the other hand promoting the activity associated to these routes. The strategies feed each other to generate centrality and connectivity.

We work in a realistic and contemporary attitude. We propose a radical urban transformation with very few resources introducing the concept of temporality by defining a plan of stages that will allow solving the present (real) by starting to build the future (ideal).

Transversality

The main public spaces of Bellvitge (Passeig de Bellvitge) and Gornal (Av. Carmen Amaya) have a N-S orientation. It is evident that there is a need to create new cross-cutting axis that will allow linking the two boulevards: a network of public spaces to connect both neighborhoods.

This idea of transversality be achieved through improving public spaces with actions of pacification, pedestrianization and naturalization. And also defining new activators on these routes (public infrastructures, retail on the ground floors, etc.) in order to strengthen the citizens’ appropriation and the revitalization of these new civic axis.

The main action is the transformation of the bridges to overcome their condition of ‘simple passages’ and become them into activity supports. Through its transformation and enlargement, bridges become high streets, nodes of activity.

Temporality

With the first actions the city will widen and integrate the ‘street-bridges’ within the system of public spaces. The transformation starts.

In a future with the tracks covered (a long promised scenario where a large linear public space would be formed) we propose a new treatment to the bridges, turning them into buildings, new facilities to the citizenship that divide this huge public linear area defining a succession of smaller urban spaces with a more human scale.

These transformations define a metropolitan centrality linked with the new urban entity resulting from the merger of Bellvitge and Gornal.

Team: Adrià Guardiet, Sandra Torres, Pere Buil, Toni Riba, Barrington Lambert, Ben van Dessel, Benjamin Malinge | Post date: 12/06/2015 | Views: 2.433