Office Building and Urban Park

By Francesco Pagliari - 8 January 2010

Barcelona is now developing one of its most extensive natural public spaces in an outlying area of the city, near what was wasteland, where the most pollutant service installations were once relegated. The project is part of a clean-up operation of rundown peripheral areas, often marred by disused factories and utilities.
The new facilities demonstrate environmental sensititivity and cultural variety, returning a wide stretch of land to public use. Both the hardscape and landscape of north-east coast park reflect the sustainability aims of Barcelona’s Forum 2004 programme. The area now contains a number of energy supply plants including a gas mains, used tyre collection, water storage, waste disposal, an extension to the existing incinerator, but also an Eco-Museum and offices, a recycling plant and an ecopark.
Abalos and Herreros wanted to dissolve the contrast between the natural and artificial, and create a radically new concept of “natural” by blending architecture and landscape, aesthetics and the hybrid elements of contemporary construction. In fact the project is at the same time a re-naturalising and architectural exercise by designers who do not disdain a brief that involves waste-disposal and creating artificial beaches.
It was soon realized that the sheer size of such a complex venture required modification of the coastline to gain back a hundred meters from the sea and create an artificial beach for the city. Infrastructural tensions called for ingenious architectural and landscaping strategies. The stark, desolate – almost surrealist – location has been treated with great sensitivity. Abalos and Herreros have applied their “latent garden” principle to respond to the challenge of creating a park, and find the gentlest ways of integrating an industrial landscape with a public amenity. In fact only by constructing a strikingly unusual public space, picturesque yet contemporary, can an appropriate civic sense of popular...