Sponginess - L'esponjament

The project understands, knows and incorporates the passing of time, remaining in the buildings, with the desire to juxtapose the existing and the new in order to adapt it to the complexity and richness of the place. It originates a route where the citizen will be the protagonist and the building the stage that will go with him in all his movements.

Sponge, sponginess … is a term that brings back the memory of baked dough in the oven. A Sunday morning in one of the bests patisserie. It's hard to transfer this word into the city. I doubt that it has anything to do with the maritime origin of the sponge or that cities have the capacity to absorb water, or increase and decrease their volume in an elastic way. Nor do I think it can be related to the proximity of the sea to this part of the city. If by this urban term we mean the multitude of interior jealousies, empty and full, we could also speak of gruyerization or emmentalization. Although it is better not to use them due to the smell and the traditional attraction that mice feel towards these cheeses. Even though, we can consider it metaphorically as a way of explaining how the urban fabric of this part of the city. Which for years has been transformed by the layout of the buildings, the use and re-use of their given pre-existence and the complex web of small-scale personal initiatives, has understood that living in this neighbourhood is the pleasure of discovering everything that has already been used. It’s like the pocket of a second-hand pair of trousers that gradually adapts to a new wearer. The projected building has the responsibility to not make anything disappears, nothing that it doesn’t feel capable of replacing/with an equivalent wealth. I want to remember that with a little bit of soap, the sponge is an excellent cleaner that ables to discover everything that exists under these surfaces and that one day was forgotten.