Fundamental

Fundamental | Mallorca, Spain | 2021
[Son Estudi]

This project involves a transformation of an existing public space. The intervention enhances existing qualities and elements by giving them a useful purpose and empowers the place as an infrastructure for future lives.

The plaza occupies a key location that articulates the historic centre with different urban fabrics, marked by pedestrian and vehicle flows that cross and circle it. Due to a series of problems, the Inca Town Council launched an open call for tenders to redesign it in 2016.

“Fonamental is a proposal that starts with the plaza’s foundations”. The subsoil physically conditions the plaza due to the presence of two underground storeys used for car parking. One of them protrudes above ground level, with the result that the plaza is divided lengthwise by a 4-metre-high wall, service areas and high skylights. This ensemble caused a barrier effect, both between the different levels of the public space and between people’s interrelations in the place.

The project acts at the intersection between levels, not only to improve the integration of the different parts of the plaza with its surroundings, but also to sow, nurture and articulate new possibilities for the future of this public space. Where the wall used to divide, now there is a new artificial topography for interacting (bleachers). Where people used to cross in the dark at night or exposed to the sun in summer, now there is shade, vegetation and lights at night for strolling (pergola). Where nothing ever happened, now there is a new space that gives life to the plaza (civic facility).

The ensemble bleachers + pergola + civic facility has been designed interconnectedly, transcending the concreteness of the elements of which it is composed and going beyond its immediate or separate uses. It crosses the plaza lengthwise and is conceived as an expandable system. This has been achieved by combining multiple criteria: constructive, programmatic, monumental, everyday, environmental and life cycle.

The main construction strategy is based on a geometric reorganisation of the plaza, using the pillars and waffle slab structure of the underground car park to coordinate the ensemble’s geometric and structural logic. In addition to the constructional rationale of continuity between old and new structures, the alignment establishes a clear criterion for the present layout’s future growth. It gives added strength to the possibility of extending the support system to the entire plaza, so that the public space reflects a renewed order that addresses the project’s vocation as an infrastructure, aligning construction and concept.

We believe that a public space must be capable of accommodating multiple activities and situations by making maximum use of existing resources. By approaching the project as an infrastructure, the redesign of the Plaza Mallorca in Inca transforms an existing public space and leverages its potential to endow it with new present and future capabilities. Text description by the architects.