COLOURED ZOCALO

Coloured Zocalo

This project is located in the heart of Mexico City at the “Plaza de la Constitución”, popularly known as “Zócalo”, which is the main square of the city.

Its design has been in constant evolution during centuries, since it was recognized as a public space even before the Spanish invasion, in the ancient city of Tenochtitlan, with political and religious uses.

From the Independence of Mexico, the “Zócalo” has been used as a location for social and cultural events, being its present appearance and design established during the sixties, when it was last modified.

Zocalo Timeline – 100architects

While this appearance is striking for its amplitude as a gap contrasting with the density of the urban fabric, it lacks of distinctive spatial features that could enhance its identity. It is a hard and monotonous square that provides a flat platform for sporadic events and daily transit yet it has little identity, and low sensitive interaction as well as poor proprioception.

As a way of reinventing it, while maintaining intact its core spatial properties, the project consists into painting the ground with a pattern that belongs to the original Mexican culture. An iconographic Mayan pattern, creating new partialities through the geometric paint in two dimensions, modifying the spatial sensation without obstructing it.

The pattern used was designed by Jacopo Severitano and published by Underworld Magazines by which the functions and possibilities of the plaza are reinterpreted into 3 different areas according to the recreative, cultural and comercial main functions happening yearly.

The lines crossing the square highlight the mayor circulation points from west to east and north south, trace the main dynamics in the space.
The result is a pattern with highly spatial potential, particularly due to the different color zones and dynamics that the pattern establishes.

It allows its users to reinterpret the public spatiality therefore generates a new square, where the color significantly changes the overall appearance of the place, gaining striking identity.
This action produces social phenomenon catalyzing new dynamics and changes in the surrounding area, modernizing the space to turn into a very intense city center, that was already presente but now enhanced.

This allows defining areas and unleashing the imagination of passersby who appropriate the space in different ways, manifesting this in their personal displacements and stays. The painting used is based on microsphere of glass, which allows tracing the lines with ease and strong adherence to the existing ground.

The painting needs to be retraced every 3 years which allows modernizing and changing the appearance, colors and identity of the Zocalo keeping it as an updated ever changing landmark of the city. Alongside, the condition of empty space that responds to the traditional urban fabric is enhanced, now containing an explosion of colors identifiable through the various axes that converge in the “Zocalo” and exacerbating its urban landmark condition.

This project focuses on deepening the spatial experience as an architectural concept. It aims to transform a space through a gentle but significant change in the individual experience of its inhabitants. It incorporates those modifications by renewing its uses and symbolism.

It is a highly proprioceptive proposal, where body movements are influenced by the work of geometry and colors, exploring the scope of body-space relationships, and providing unique space characteristics that allows highly recognition for its inhabitants.

@100architects

CREDITS:

Project Name: Huellas Artes
Design: 100architects (Shanghai)
Design Team: Marcial Jesús, Pablo Juica, Madalena Sales.
Client: no client
Area: 744 m2
Completion: May 2014
Location: Santiago, Chile
Photographer: 100architects + Ines Subtil

LUCKY COIN

Lucky Coin
Hong Kong, China | Grounded Object

This project is located in Hong Kong, next to the delta of the Pearl River in the public pier of Kowloon, facing Hong Kong Island. The site is just besides multiple cultural venues such as the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, Hong Kong Museum of Arts and the Hong Kong Space Museum among others.

This remarkable location consists on great advantage since provides amazing views to the Hong Kong Island while interacting with vibrant pedestrian flows and cultural venues of the surrounding area, becoming a point of great interest to tourists and passersby.

Facing this background, the project aims to incorporate a number of uses and functions to a well limited space. It proposes a wide range of programmatic uses that inject new functions and happenings, providing commercial and entertainment spaces as well as an internet hot point, continuously interacting with the virtual world.

This object plaza exhibits Hong Kong from itself, from its dense culture and intense way of living as well as creating a recognizable element for the masses. The project provides lively and culturally active area, with multiple use possibilities mixed and demarcated by small spatial differences.

It contains 10 different functions in 10 different platforms inserted as separate pieces perpendicularly circumscribed in the circular shape. It hosts a restaurant, a playground, green areas, dining area, event area, seating area, hammocks area among others.

Beside the commercial and entertainment functions, the project offers an intense stimulation by its appearance and colors. It is a landmark with a remarkable appearance and highly proprioceptive nature provoking an intense sensorial stimulation.

The concept of Lucky Coin is used as a link to the Chinese cultural traditional fortune symbol, since it has the shape of the traditional ancient Chinese coin, used under the Qing dynasty, widely used during the years 1644 and 1912.

The project represents it by the circular shape leaving a square space in the center, resembling the Chinese traditional coin. This space is the interception of all the functions, a highly adaptable space that articulates the different platforms and simultaneously serving as performance area.

The main materiality of the project is reinforced concrete painted yellow with yellow and pink painted wood deck platforms, painted aluminium recreative structures, rubber pavements and complemented with outdoor illumination systems as lamp sticks and aluminium parapets.

As a result, this project is a catalyst for various social dynamics, which relates the urban landscape to daily living, emphasizing characteristics of both. The spatial experience of performing multiple activities, gives a characteristic identity that makes this project a object of civic identity.

Credits

PROJECT NAME: Lucky Coin
DESIGN: 100 Architects (Shanghai)
DESIGN TEAM: Marcial Jesús, Madalena Sales
CLIENT: Undisclosed
SIZE: 3,280 m2
STATUS: Unbuilt
LOCATION: Kowloon, HongKong (China)

SUPREMATIST POOL

Suprematist Pool
Moscow, Russia | Grounded Object | Sumer days

The Suprematist Pool is located in Moscow city center, over the Moskva River and next to Pushkinskii Bridge and Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure. The project is an addition to the current uses of the park, where a recent project renewed its riverside edge, giving it contemporary features.

The idea is allow the access to the river and establish a relationship with the water component, encouraging unexplored uses on it. The possibility of generating a floating pool on the river opens a spatial perspective of the city.

An important feature of the project is it is composed of different floating components, that allow its use in summer, while it can be dissembled when the winter comes. It is a temporary floating element.

The formal composition and concept of this project are based on a famous painting by Kazimir Malevich following the precepts of Suprematism and its principles of “pure non-objectivity”.

This painting is used as an aesthetic inspiration, due to its geometric composition that makes it an appropriated visual object of the Russian culture. Between abstraction and sensitivity of inhabited space, providing a socio-spatial character to pure geometric patterns.

It is the purity of these patterns what define the space connections, rhythms, tensions and uses, avoiding the induction on functional pre-established shapes.

Programmatically the project connects the riverbank with its interior, through a wooden deck, allowing fluid access to floating platforms that contains the pools. These platforms are interconnected and displayed according to the painting.

Its structures are built in metal and wood, with glass fiber hulls in the sides joined by a steel structure geometry-stabilized from its wide beam. The project allows having independent floating platforms to ensemble or dissembling according to the seasonal needs.

Over this deck, spatial complementary volumes such as showers and changing rooms are placed which corresponding to the Maleviche’s geometric composition, re-interpreted under volumetric properties. In its urban insertion, the floating pavilion acts as an extension of the surrounded park, linked to it and adding value of a spatial living structure.

As consequence, the sense of leisure in the city space is enhanced, exacerbating spatial interpretation different from the current urban spaces; It offers a unusual perception of the city.

Credits

PROJECT NAME: Suprematist Pool
DESIGN: 100 Architects (Shanghai)
DESIGN TEAM: Marcial Jesús, Madalena Sales
CLIENT: Undisclosed
STATUS: Unbuilt
LOCATION: Moscow, Russia
COMPLETION: 2014