Public Spaces: Aquatic Spaces

Abstract

Water and hydrological process, as rain, puddles, overflows or evaporations, define landscape essential conditions, integrating them within the city contributes to build urban public space´s identity and character, needed to transform many growing areas that are anodyne and banal (onMuñoz, 2008). Making place for hydrological variability in the public realm goes beyond the environmental benefits to incorporate aestetic and symbolic contents related to water, that enrich space and the somatic experience that it offers, and enable the construction of proper anthropological places. During last decades of the 20th century, architects have proposed sucessive conceptualizations about the city as a continuous spacial structure, non objectual, mainly horizontal but with a certain thickness (Allen, 1999). Throught its voids flow air, water, information and energy. These references to urban structure as a porous and spong-like landscape, suggest the imagination of a different relationship with water: the city as a seeping mechanism, as a rainharvesting landscape, able to soak, in a totally different way to the current impervious surfaces and drainlet systems, where water dissapears almost inmediatly. In the thickness of this porous megastructure, bigger voids correspond with the public and monumental sphere, where the spatial dimension and the water presence turn mea-ningfull to the city. In these hollows, geometrical coincidence between meeting and water gathering forms, both related to concavities, present an interesting potential for mixing uses and combining symbolic contents. To integrate civic and environmental programs, makes way to an urban landscape own monumentality, that referst to this new parliament between humans and non humans (Latour,1997). These concave shapes, that as an architectural prototype reaches the greek theather, have the hability to take out water from scientific and environmental visions. To separate it from the outside and focus the atention to the inside is in someway to frame it, to objectify it, in order to highlight the aesthetics and aproach a certain way of monumentality.