Common Ground.

The project explores the design of the in-between, the empty, the void – the moment the city breathes and ends. From the scale of the island to the scale of a square, the extension of the project methodology intends to translate a careful approach to the place and constant learning about the landscape together with the responsibility of designing the public.

Designing public space requires a kind of silence that is not intrinsic to all architecture. It is, in fact, quite characteristic of itself. Nevertheless, the generosity of proposing a void is revealed when its scarcity is understood and even more so when coupled with the awareness that voids also have form, and these must be designed. The search for the harmony of place rather than the addition of an 'author' over the territory was the goal sought, to explore an architecture that is for the place and not for the architect, questioning the perverse relationship established between power and the architects that we often find in the design of what is public. Today the Autonomia Square has become a non-place with an unobstructed horizon view. The violence with which speed has sterilized life and transformed the shared space into rickety pavements has accelerated this process. The indifference that the infrastructure establishes with the area that hosts it, combined with the alienation of the ruins of the old Fort, has shaped the idea of a place unaware of its whole and central position in Funchal. The existence of two square must be acknowledged, neighboring but independent in their limits. The design of the old square is a design of recognition; this happens through reading the memory of the place previously described by understanding its condition and alignment with the city. Complementarily, it is necessary to establish a current relationship with the ruins of Fort S. Filipe, discovering the role they have in the contemporary city. The design of a new square seeks to investigate an ambition but does not seek to inform its geometry only in memory. Thus, its geometry is given by contrast- the creation of a void in a place where there has always been a volume - but also by the analogy of recognizing the site as an operative and defensive character of the city - proposing under the square a functional area for cleaning the riverside. In this way, the investigation falls on the thought of the countless events that these spaces can host and on the understanding that we are designing for all but, in essence, for no one in specific.