The center of the town Olot, Spain, is almost half empty. The slow outward migration of development from the core of this 15th century Catalonian town 70 miles north of Barcelona has shrunk the population and led to a series of demolitions of aging buildings. To try to stop the town center’s decline, a local architecture office is working with the town council, local organizations, and community members to bring life back into these emptied spaces.
“The project of the squares is seen as one of the main strategies to revitalize the central area of the town,” says Callís.
The firm’s first intervention was at the site of a newly demolished building on the end of a block. In the space the demolition had opened up, the town planned to create a simple plaza with stone pavement–the typical empty square that is common across Spain. Unparell’darquitectes proposed a different solution. They suggested shifting the budget, opting for a cheaper concrete pavement for the ground and using the leftover money to transform the rough edge of the building that was previously connected to the now demolished structure. On its ruined facade, they’ve added simple brick walls that rise to three arches, forming three small alcoves that look out on the new square and are illuminated at night.
This focus on the edge of the plaza is guiding the firm’s approach to the other eight public spaces they’re redesigning in the town. “We are convinced that public space, especially in compact cities, is determined by the facades not by the pavement,” Callís says. “And more than the facades, but what happens behind these facades.”
All nine interventions will likely take several years to be completed, as they rely on a small pool of funding from the town council’s budget, but some will be fast and cheap. The brick alcove project cost just around $42,000.
Callís says his firm will continue to work with the town council and local organizations to plan out how the edges of other public spaces can be revived. Local residents have made clear their desire for more places to gather in public, and traditional public space amenities like trees, benches, and fountains. Callís says these will be included, but they’ll hopefully also be augmented by surroundings that are no longer boarded up, vacant, and abandoned. “It’s through these squares we can put new foundations into the center,” he says.