Jardinillos Park, a water-based remodeling project attending to universal accessibility

The public space is the place of relationships, memory and future remembrance. It´s the place where citizens should enjoy the shared space. Located in the center of the city of Palencia, a large number of unfortunate interventions have taken place in Jardinillos area. This has resulted in a distortion of the park, designed as a reception room for travelers arriving by railway to Palencia, but it also has led to isolate this area from the rest of the city. Beyond being a connection area, Jardinillos was a border-park with numerous impediments to be crossed by its neighbors. It was a public space that had repressed its permeability to the rest of the city as well as with the railway and bus stations, since the natural access to them is through the park. As in so many other cities, this public space was abandoned in its maintenance, becoming that way an inhospitable and dangerous place at nightfall, marked by partial and incoherent interventions. The exposed facts required reverting the situation by an ambitious renovation project, respectful with every tree that previously existed. The intervention aimed to create a warp, a project with a global and integrative vocation which would solve every functional problem. For this reason, the project (the result of the ideas competition in 2018) emerges from a system of concatenated squares for the purpose of making easier the integration of the different parts of the park. This is achieved through silent interventions made at zero level. After the renovation, Jardinillos is now organized in two opposed realities: the first one, horizontal, is defined by the strength that granite provides; the second one, vertical, is characteristic of the organic condition of its trees. The proposal is solved without outstanding elements, attending to universal accessibility. The aim was to recover a place, a landscaped space that favors calm and storytelling. It is a park where the trees rise for dozens of years, casting their shadows and letting settle, from the heights, their leaves like colored mats on the new tapestry made of a granite with a will of permanence. Granite is the material of the environment. It is available a few kilometers away, being used in the main pedestrian streets of Palencia. Its treatment, as well as its modeling in different pieces of urban furniture, applies a binding and identity function. The pavement, resolved through a modulation and varying its scale and formats, is arranged in different thickness and size granite slabs organized in the shape of an ear of corn. Over this carpet rise the different pieces of furniture, which have been specially designed in order to maintain the unity of the whole without falling into monotony. A further resource that should identify the Jardinillos Park (or parks) remodelling was the water. A sheet of specular water was designed with the aim of boosting and causing symmetry effects in regarding to the trees that it embraces. These seem to emerge from the water, doubling their height and creating endless elongation effects that fade away in the black bottom of the pond. This sheet of water is adapted in its perimeter, flexed where there were trees, as a bench seat. As a result of this special tank configuration and position, it becomes a meeting point for citizens. Finally, the large appearance and height vegetation facilitates the park shading, really leafy in certain parts, so we have not considered appropriate to provide the area with complementary shading.