‘Can Sau – Emergency Scenery’ facade project by unparelld’architects – All photos by Jose Hevia, unless stated otherwise, courtesy of unparelld’architects.
Architecture – In the earth of the city of Olot in Catalonia, Spain, three buttresses of a demolished building protruded on a small square creating a silent urban void. unparelld’arquitectes has transformed the abandoned lot into the Can Sau – Emergency scenery project, an inhabitable brick façade of three vaults and four niches into a new a public space.
“The demolition of the ‘Can Sau’ house for street alignment in front of the church of the patron saint of Olot led to the disfigurement of the street and destruction of the ordinary landscape.” Explain Eduard Callís and Guillem Moliner, head of unparelld’arquitectes.
Upon request for a pavement project and an ongoing contract for a waterproof metal cladding, the assignment was reformulated. “It was urgent to allocate resources to the vertical plane to endow the space with urbanity, apart from guaranteeing the waterproof qualities of the party wall. In the compact city, the façades take responsibility for giving shape and character to the street.”
With hollow brick, an emergency scenery was built. It completes what the buttresses suggest, revealing in the background the traces of domestic activity marked on the party wall. The porous façade, accompanied by a minimum of stands, is an unfinished and appropriable structure.
Visual artist Quim Domene intervened on the completed niches by adding elements allegorical to the history of the neighborhood. The Tura church, confined between narrow streets, now gains a public space, presided by the blinded door of the previous temple from the XV century.
unparelld’arquitectes is an architectural office led by Eduard Callís and Guillem Moliner based in Olot. “We foster exchanges between infrastructure and decoration, between the domestic sphere and the public space, between the city and the garden. We build radiant scenes, scenes capable of activating the activity, of narrating a new story that is attentive to real life and of building an atmosphere according to its characteristics of space, symbolism, materiality and light.”
All images of Can Sau. Emergency scenery by Jose Hevia, unless stated otherwise – Courtesy of unparelld’arquitectes.
