Management of the Maritime Border of Vigo

Coastal cities are characterized by their relationship with the sea, a relationship that intensifies and materializes in port cities. Ports, as happens with stations and airports, are places of transit, places that belong materially and physically to the city but conceptually to the world, to its links and relationships, to travel, to the non-place. Building in the port of Vigo means building on the memory that the city has of its relationship with the sea, building on travel.

The port landscape is characterized by its volumetric mobility. The stowage of containers and the incessant coming and going of large freighters and ocean liners make up a changing landscape, an unconsolidated, never finished landscape. Shapes, materials and colors in continuous change.

Some of this permeates the architecture of the new buildings proposed in the competition. An architecture that does not borrow from ships or their forms or their language. They have more to do with places, with the very conditions of their surroundings. Outside of this context they would lose their meaning and their reason for being.

A glass container -aquarium-, streets of light -commercial building- and a bright volume -administrative building-, depending on the atmospheric conditions, light and point of view, they will become opaque, dense, present but also shiny, transparent, invisible. They will disappear. Like containers, like ships.

The jury of the contest assigned us the construction of the Aquarium, the conditioning of the Maritime Station for the Museum of the City and the Management of the Maritime Edge in this urban section, a set of interventions developed over two kilometers in the sector corresponding to the area central city.

The majority of the pedestrianization of the entire sector led to the construction of a tunnel reserved for road traffic and underground car parks. The proposal therefore includes the treatment of the access ramps to the tunnel as well as of all the emergencies that the engineering works could give rise to: emergency exits, evacuation routes, generators' chimneys, ventilation of the tunnel or of the car parks. , traffic roundabouts, etc., integrating them into the general arrangement of open spaces.

In all these interventions as well as in the design of the pieces of urban furniture that have been produced specifically for this Maritime Front: lights, benches, wastebaskets, tree pits, etc. criteria of economy of gestures, rationality and economic profitability have prevailed. Choice of good materials - in our case, magnificent granite pieces and a careful and demanding execution that ensure durability and low maintenance costs. Criteria aimed at the elimination of excesses, so common today in so many interventions in public spaces, perhaps introducing a certain component of anonymity in the face of personal expression and in which the presence of a tenuous architecture, in an intense relationship with nature, affirms its undeniable willingness to be absent, to almost not be.