San Miguel District Refurbishment

OOIIO Architecture

Project description

The main intention of this urban intervention is to revitalize a degraded district in the center of an 85.000 habitant’s city in Spain named Talavera by recycling its public spaces. OOIIO Architecture won the competition organized for 2 public spaces, with its proposal based on the reinterpretation of local traditional pottery, normally used in small objects like jugs or typical dishes, now applied to an urban scale. The Renaissance strong yellow and blue colors mix, its traditional drawings as well as the ancient local crafty way of working with the ceramics made this project a unique combination of tradition and modernity, color and public space. Before the intervention, both public squares were residual, non-accessible for elderly or disabled people and used as informal parking, with ancient ruins and local monuments creating a chaotic urban landscape. With a few simple interventions both spaces turned suddenly into one of the most attractive squares in the city. We left the horizontal plane as accessible and comfortable as possible for pedestrians reducing traffic to a defined tracks, protecting the main open spaces with benches, specifically located to contemplate great mosaics of Talavera´s pottery that will completely change the look of the square forever. The strong and visual intervention in the vertical plane will contribute to recover and enhance the existing medieval tower of the ancient wall, which was being lost in between grey buildings competing in height with it.