La salut public spaces

The neighborhood of La Salut is a peripheral quarter of Badalona, a big council attached to Barcelona. It grew strongly in the 60s and 70s with immigration from the south of Spain, and recently strong identity problems have emerged due to a high rate of new immigration from all over the world.

The aim of the intervention is to give identity to the whole area through those two key spaces, giving them presence, providing them with the required functions, and reflecting the complexity of the environment.

Presence. The spaces were residual areas. The successive transformations of the neighborhood in social standard, public facilities, and infrastructures have given them a new presence. The intervention is a process of “emptying” the space. Where before there was a superimposition of fixed elements (walls, street lamps, stairs, benches, shrubs…), now there is geometry and flows of people.

Formal simplicity. The new squares respond to a great number of circulation flows. We opted to simplify the form of the squares to the maximum, reducing them to inclined planes defined by their triangular limits—isotropic spaces where itineraries are not prioritized and where free flow is facilitated.

Identity. From the limits of the triangular space, an abstract composition is defined by geometry, which reacts to the complexity of the context. A composition of colors that confers character and singularity has been superimposed—red in the case of the market square, because of the representative character of the building.