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Architects: Màrius Quintana Creus
- Year: 2010
Text description provided by the architects. The common areas and homogeneous facilities along the coast are the starting point for the design of new elements to furnish the beaches and provide first aid, washrooms, washroom and dressing room for the disabled, beverages and ice cream kiosk, waste and recycling containers, information booth and police.
This common area involves a common element in terms of materials and form adapted to the environment and the landscape. In addition, these elements through their aggregation and repetition must allow different uses with the same basic construction system and the minimum necessary occupancy of the sand area. They must also have a low visual opacity in the direction from the city to the sea, to allow transparency between the promenade and the beach across the coastal strip.
The idea arises from the installation by Donald Judd entitled "15 Untitle Works In Concrete" (1980-1984) at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. It is a magnificent example of how starting with a single element with an extreme formal simplicity, a landscape is colonized through the repetition or aggregation of such elements which are always equal to each other.
The cube is proposed as a common form to all the elements that have to conform the various programs. The cube as minimal and simple form that requires a discipline in the design of all its parts and its layout, repetition and aggregation strategies.
The cube as an element that is integrated and respects the landscape of the beaches, although it is not a natural or organic form, is the highest abstraction of the rocks, the bathing huts, sea shelters ... in the middle of the vast landscape dominated by the sea and sand.
The characteristic material of the cubes will be the ceramic mosaic cladding, as it will also serve as signaling. Each program will be associated with a color so that the user can easily distinguish it from afar.
The mosaic is a recyclable material, easily reparable from the aggressions caused by shocks and painted with a wide range of colors. It is a material linked to the Mediterranean tradition and craft related to water and bathrooms, and therefore associated to the salubrity required in public spaces.
