NEW PROJECT FROM A RUBBISH DUMP
Architecture, Urban Design, Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, or Photography? Mixed Media
Fernando Viscasillas, visual artist, focuses on public spaces and architecture.
Vigo emerges in the Spanish Northwestern coast as an active industrial and port city. Its spectacular growth during the 20th century allowed it to spend just 46,000 inhabitants in 1900 to the 300,000 today. Accommodate this intense demographic increase, nourished mainly by immigrants from inside the country, became a especially complicated task, due to both its magnitude and the difficulties providing a steep topography, modeled on an ancient granite context, fractured by successive orogenic processes.
The greed of the agents involved and the laxity of the authorities allowed the development of the city to run so voracious and messy the central decades of the last century, generating dysfunctional spaces that, in addition to fading the urban landscape, form insurmountable architectural barriers and they end up contributing to its degradation.
We had to wait until this decade that it has been decided to finally tackle a project, “VIGO VERTICAL” with which current municipal policymakers seek to correct those inherited dysfunctions, starting in 2014, with the first escalators, and in 2015, with the first elevator. Thanks to this program, Vigo received a special mention in the 2018 Access City Award, organised by the European Commission.
Marqués de Valterra Street constituted one of those degraded sites until December of 2018, where the artist Viscasillas raised a comprehensive reorganization, included in the program Vigo Vertical. With a thoughtful and correct use of color, the sculpture, study of pavement, benches, Viscasillas has succeeded in transforming a abandoned plot in a new public space through integrated urban design of the square.
In this work we can see an example of the contribution of artists in architectural interventions to retrieve and make available to citizens a new space, but, above all, represents the overcoming of architectural barriers (tangible boundaries) and its transformation into a space for pedestrian communication.
Emilio Pallarés Álvarez, Enciclopedist, History Teacher
Architecture, Urban Design, Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, or Photography? Mixed Media
Fernando Viscasillas, visual artist, focuses on public spaces and architecture.
Vigo emerges in the Spanish Northwestern coast as an active industrial and port city. Its spectacular growth during the 20th century allowed it to spend just 46,000 inhabitants in 1900 to the 300,000 today. Accommodate this intense demographic increase, nourished mainly by immigrants from inside the country, became a especially complicated task, due to both its magnitude and the difficulties providing a steep topography, modeled on an ancient granite context, fractured by successive orogenic processes.
The greed of the agents involved and the laxity of the authorities allowed the development of the city to run so voracious and messy the central decades of the last century, generating dysfunctional spaces that, in addition to fading the urban landscape, form insurmountable architectural barriers and they end up contributing to its degradation.
We had to wait until this decade that it has been decided to finally tackle a project, “VIGO VERTICAL” with which current municipal policymakers seek to correct those inherited dysfunctions, starting in 2014, with the first escalators, and in 2015, with the first elevator. Thanks to this program, Vigo received a special mention in the 2018 Access City Award, organised by the European Commission.
Marqués de Valterra Street constituted one of those degraded sites until December of 2018, where the artist Viscasillas raised a comprehensive reorganization, included in the program Vigo Vertical. With a thoughtful and correct use of color, the sculpture, study of pavement, benches, Viscasillas has succeeded in transforming a abandoned plot in a new public space through integrated urban design of the square.
In this work we can see an example of the contribution of artists in architectural interventions to retrieve and make available to citizens a new space, but, above all, represents the overcoming of architectural barriers (tangible boundaries) and its transformation into a space for pedestrian communication.
Emilio Pallarés Álvarez, Enciclopedist, History Teacher
