Fragmento Mediante. Equipped Public Space

Place of fragments

The city of Vitoria is surrounded by small rural settlements. Several of these villages have recently been absorbed into the city. This situation offers the opportunity to enrich, through their identity, the generic and disjointed character of the new developments.

The project is located at the boundary between two different fabrics: the old village of Ali and the new neighbourhoods, a place shaped by the railway, an oversized road network, and an ambiguous notion of landscape. The proposal is set within this transitional zone to explore its limits and generate an encounter between its multiple fragments.

A meeting point

Three buildings: a library, a sports facility and a coworking centre, are arranged around a new urban space: an enclosed, raised plaza kept free from traffic, which acts as a transitional mechanism, abstracting and connecting the surrounding contexts while generating visual perspectives toward the most significant points.

Each building relates to the others and to its surroundings through its form, responding to the two scales of the place: the lower volumes, through their oblique geometry, dialogue with the immediate scale of the village, while the taller, more generic volumes respond to the scale of the city.

Shared spatiality

The three buildings share a common spatial order: the large hall, a compact service core, and a system of voids and circulation, with variations according to their use. This organisation is replicated in section: a wide-span hall on the ground floor and smaller spaces stacked above converge in a double-height space.

They are unified through a single material expression, an envelope of precast concrete panels, a choice that underlines a strategy in which each building gains its own value through its outline and its distinct position. The site’s dual scales are expressed in the modulation of the façade: panels, window frames, sun protection.