Anyone whose job involves writing is well aware that words, in spite of themselves, are like stone: suspended in a conversation, printed in black and white, they construct a meaning that cannot be erased. Even those who work in architecture may start with the written word to get to the physical nature of a building.
Spanish architects Mamen Domingo and Ernest Ferré, for example, draw on literary references – or the “world of words” – in their work. Their design for a piazza alongside the Segre River in Lleida, Spain, transposes into architecture a poem by Marius Torres (La Ciutat lejana written in 1939 at the end of the Civil War): “No nos pueda casi otro consuelo que creer y esperar la nueva arquitectura que con brazos mas libres pueda surcar de nuevo el suelo” (We have no other comfort than to create and await a new architecture that with free arms can newly rise up from the ground).
As such the urban design reveals a double meaning: a political one and its transposition into architecture with tall blades rising up from a platform that the architects call “las torres de la palabra” (the towers of the word). These inclined daggers trace lines of light and shade on the ground and from the top a fine mist of water is diffused that vibrates in the sunlight and interweaves the shadows. Domingo and Ferré say that it is “the writing of a script that is rewritten everyday”.
