Competition. Civic Center at Begues. Barcelona

The future civic centre is located inside an exceptional place: across the beautiful old slaughter house, a building of extraordinary proportion and harmony. A delicious surrounding: with the river stream, the reedbed, the old trees and the backline of the forest.
Therefore, our design tries to add value, keeping the magic of the landscape, with new activities and volumes with soft textures which emerge from the reedbed under the old trees towards the mountain.

The proposal consist in a serial of cubic volumes finished in treated wood, jointed together around two plazas and connecting them with the old slaughterhouse through a new footbridge-viewpoint. The first plaza, more urban, is between the auditorium and the library. The second one, more private and with more local character, is where the new footbridge arrives and where we keep all the existent old trees. It is about jointed volumes of small proportion, which attempt to be prudent, keeping the existing reedbed harmony and where the supporting spaces have almost the same strength as the main spaces inside the dens required program.

The surrounding landscape with the background forest, the river stream, the reedbed and the presence of the old slaughterhouse building, transform the intervention into an integration act.
We try to appropriate the river stream space creating several spaces inside it where you can read, listen to music or just talk, connected all together through a footpath coming from the main street, across the internal plaza and into the several access points of the civic centre.

The composing criteria is not taking off anything that is alive, sinking a part of the centre and where the resulting volumes do not rise above the height of the old existing trees.
We design as well some reception points, where the external space and the project help each other to increase the activity of the civic centre from the peace and harmony of the place.