Arquitectura, diseño y urbanismo
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This square this located only 2 streets north of Rocafuerte Square, both having very similar characteristic: it is inserted in the financial center of the city, and it also possesses important historical references; the monument to Pedro Carbo and La Merced church. Just as with the other one, the urban transformations of last century reduced its scale notably, but in this case this perception is more aggressive, since the size of this building doesn't overcome the mass of the buildings surrounding the square, and next to it there is a tower that lessens even more its size.

Even with the logged similarities, this square presented its own characteristics that marked differences with regard to Rocafuerte Square:

• Before the regeneration this space had a perimeter fencing, transfiguring this way the square concept to park, which remained isolated from the urban transformations of the moment, having more connotations of a rural park than of a square.
• This space is not an extension of the atrium of the church, since a street separated them.
• The area was not so degraded, and it was not taken by the informal trade.

Once the context in which this space was inserted was understood, it was necessary to redefine its functions, clearly tied to the city and its inhabitants. To do this its original concept of square is recaptured eliminating the fencing that limited it, being integrated to the process of urban regeneration.

For the planning the following considerations were thought about:

• To return as much as possible to the space and the church, the scale especially reduced by the tower located next to it.
• To design a pavement that connects the most important references (church and monument)
• To transform the park image, redesigning the green areas in function of the circulations, views, and existent trees whose shape was quite acceptable.
• To modify the tracing of the road that separates the church from the square, displacing it toward the square, in such a way that you can increase the surface so reduced of the atrium of the church as much as possible.
• To generate levels that break up the monotony of the horizontal surface.
• To appeal to elements of great communicative load with the purpose of magnifying the presence of the monument, granting it true participation.

The design outlines the creation of a slate stone platform that involves the monument. This surface goes parallel to Pedro Carbo street and it maintains a slight slope that begins on the sidewalk of this street running to its opposite border with 2 levels or steps, obtaining this way a base whose size grants hierarchy to the monument. Just as in Rocafuerte Square the platform has a black stone grid drawn on its surface, which expands toward the left and toward the right of the platform, projecting itself even over the roadway until it reaches the facade of the church and being integrated with the atrium, which could grow thanks to the fact that existing traffic tracing conditions allowed the displacement of the road a little toward the square. This resource allowed to improve the disproportionate relationship between the surface of the atrium and the facade. The unifying perception of this virtual fusion between atrium and platform perceives a projection of the shade of the building facade on the pavement, being able therewith to reinterpret the scale of the place.

An elliptic-shaped surface located in one end of the square shares its area with the square and with the platform, and it is divided in two levels because of the existent difference between both. Half of the ellipse that is incrusted in the platform has a red marble wall-border, which surrounds the monument thus being now in the center of this figure it also has within a fountain created in this space with the purpose of increasing the aesthetic value of the assembly.

The other half of the ellipse located in the back part of the monument also maintains its marked perimeter with a stripe of red marble (at floor level) that closes the whole figure. Reinforcing this perimeter there is a gadget as a reference in three dimensions. The pavement that contains the marble border contrasts intentionally with the rest of the floors granting an autonomy to this area.

To treat the surroundings, restaurants and bars were allowed to be created in the neighboring buildings, therefore an area in the surface of the square specifically for tables and chairs was foreseen in the design.