A square is an empty urban space, a place for contact and relaxation, a space where time takes place.
The design imagines a landscape where the collective can be expressed through liberty, multiplicity, and heterogeneity.
Liberty: based on physical fluidity and flexibility of use through subjective composition.
Multiplicity: meaning the rush of sensations attracting our senses.
Heterogeneity: through integrating individualities, which are the elements that shape it.
Suppose natural elements (trees, stones, water) are endowed with individuality and artificial elements (weathering steel, light, and concrete) with processes. In that case, the ensuing secret dialogue organizes and attracts the parts into the whole. An activated landscape is created. Nothing organises Everything.
Space is the void between the elements. Asymmetrical masses balance the space. Space is temporary, and this temporality creates other spaces. These produce a transition, mental, then another, and another as one walks. Space tenses and relaxes in these different spaces. In this subjective rhythm, the recurrent elements create simplicity, harmony, and gradation. The space is stretched transversally and vertically, and the inhabitant is at the intersection.
The result is a place where, on many days, children play, those working take a break, and people chat. Weddings, funerals and concerts are held … a place where Mediterranean cypresses grow and one day will be eternal … but also sacred trees of the Orient, ginkgos, whose organic shapes soften the space.
If one takes one’s shoes off, one can feel the tectonic quality of the ground in the roughness of the limestone and identify, being solid, descriptive, and dense, with the different sizes and lengths of the stone slabs or with the lightness of the weathering steel of the furniture.