Park of Colours
” A place where it rains every morning -early-“
“Imagine a building which stays on a topography which doesn’t exist..”
Were we negating the land?
There are few empty lands in the periphery such as the one we found here.
A place where it rains every morning - early
The site where the park and civic centre will be developed for local residents with spare time, mainly children and retired people, is on the periphery of Mollet. From the very outset, we decided that an existing Romanesque building would be the model for the centre, and we made every effort to copy it as literally as possible. However, on site our structure began to mutate, little by little, and move away from the original model. Nonetheless, something of it remained -- the need to climb up long flights of stairs and ramps --, while other aspects changed: the stones and earth sustaining the construction disappeared, leaving the building suspended over the highest section of an uninterrupted park.
Imagine a building that stands on a non-existent relief...
We wondered whether we were rejecting the site. Few empty sites such as this one exist on the periphery, and we thought that perhaps the residents - immigrants, old people - would replace the land and its relief with their own bodies, holding up the building as we observe in some of Chagalls paintings. Or perhaps the building itself would become their bodies, allowing people to imagine they could fly over cities and objects, like archaeologists who dare not touch the ground.
The walls are plastered with graffiti. On the other hand, the suspended park walls become graffiti in themselves. The walls repeat the name of the place, repeat the letters, and the letters are superimposed over each other and merge until all they can do is cast shadows on the ground.
The building's shifting shadows create a place on the ground, while the small changes on the surface mark out the playing areas, the paths, the benches, the skating rink, the areas set aside for petanque, etc.
Maybe the people living here: the emigrants and the old people, will substitute with their own bodies the land and topography, resembling Chagall’s paintings as they sustaini the building top of themselves.
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