Manduca

Paseo la Plaza has always captivated us locals for its enigmatic urban space, whose language chimes with the collective idea of a heterogeneous city — Buenos Aires especially. The prevalence of void, air and planting literally illustrates the identity of the plaza its name announces. Its cobbled alleys surround the theatres, where each building has an identity that clearly echoes an old village. It is in this unique quality, so valued by its visitors, that we looked at how to bring in a new identity — one that had to keep "La Plaza" as the protagonist and "Manduca" as its market, necessarily integrated. This careful integration between both worlds takes the form of an element we called the "ribbon", and it constitutes the market's identity. It is a communication platform in itself, speaking a contemporary, dynamic language integrated along its whole length, and it also carries a sustainable planting proposal. In this way Manduca is also a plaza within the paseo. The strategy was to keep the heterogeneity of its buildings in tectonic and formal terms, while homogenising their volumes through dark tones, so that the building defining the new use — the market — stands apart not only through its light tones but through its tectonics. The Paseo de la Plaza building is dense masonry; the new building we call the "ribbon" is light and made of sheet metal. This piece lifts off the ground between planted beds, holding ten shopfronts designed like the windows of old pavement bars. The furniture facing those windows is resolved in the same language. With the same language as the porches, we defined common areas for the complex's diners, as a natural continuation of the construction system.

We proposed a white paving in front of the shops, as if they were their own pavements. Then grey, and then black, creating a gradient towards a central organic figure that emulates a stream and unifies the planted areas along the paseo. Its diagonal layout links the common areas on both sides of the market. The large planted areas around the tower were reworked to allow use within them, through a walkable, absorbent paving. There we proposed cement street furniture in organic shapes that, through their form, accompany the green areas filled with new native species. On the first level, facing the main theatre, common areas were set out with communal picnic-style tables. This area is covered by two large tensioned canopies, and beneath them a kind of garland lighting in a fairground key. The ground floor of Paseo Manduca was adapted with an accessible toilet and a goods lift connecting the basements and ground floor of half the shops. The sustainable strategy was to reuse the old building, demolishing only what was necessary, respecting the existing modularity and the same access points to the former shops, but with new facades. The project added many square metres of planting on the roofs of every shopfront, adding green surfaces to the already green Paseo la Plaza. Cobblestones and permeable ground were brought in to absorb rainwater, and the paseo's original trees were preserved through the demolition.