Arquitectura, diseño y urbanismo
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This square is located in the commercial and financial heart of the city, next to 9 de Octubre Avenue, the most emblematic traffic axis of the city of Guayaquil where the most important collective functions are gathered. In this context, the historical references already spoken of stand out; San Francisco's church and the monument toVicente Rocafuerte, one of the most outstanding political leaders of the Republican History.

The surroundings, as it usually happens with historical squares, were radically transformed in the last decades of the last century; the towers that now contain the space have reduced their scale.

Before its recovery, although it complied with being an open space of public concentration, in the last years a progressive deterioration in the physical, environmental, and functional factors became evident. There, informal trade activities, meetings, public manifestations, and cultural expressions were developed in antagonistic and chaotic ways. The informal trade had taken more than a third of its surface, degrading the space and creating an image of disorder and insecurity, a passing place, not an enjoyable one.

In this degradation process, the green areas and the trees had also lost their landscaping dimension. Images of incongruent and spoiled morphology tree blocks contributed to reinforce a disfuncional image.

For the planning of the square, the following considerations were proposed:

* To return, as much as possible, the scale to the space and the monument, reduced by the surrounding buildings, with the help of artifices that change the perception of the space containing also a great communicavtive load.
* To design a pavement that connects and magnifies the most important references.
* To improve the confused arboreal image given by the presence of species so heterogeneous and not very harmonic among themselves, by means of pruning and other resources, or with a more radical proposal: the restitution of the existent trees for other new ones whose morphological characteristic completely comply with all the landscaping requirements.

The pavement proposal played an important role in the design, in the church-monument environment a rectangular andesite stone platform with a plaid pattern of black slate stone, with the purpose of granting him a scale that harmonizes the elements of the context. The thickness of the platform creates a difference in level with the purpose of granting it autonomy, which stands out as it is set in angle to the church and without having orthogonal references neither with the building nor with the urban plot, being projected toward the corner where the two roads that surround it intersect eachother . Two elements are superimposed in this platform; the first one consists on a great trapezoidal step embedded to the church facade whose level coincides with the level of the building, becoming this way its entrance atrium, which conserves the original pavement of hand-carved stone.

The second element consists of a ellipse-shaped fountain that bounds the monument, locating it in such a way that the monument is in the later half of its longitudinal axis, which is also oriented toward the corner of the square, with an angle different to that of the platform, as if looking for a horizon toward the river. The fountain size modifies the space perception and scale of the whole, carrying out a great tangible and intangible communicative load.

To the left of the monument and within the same platform the urban furniture and the new trees were located to replace to the previous ones, laid out with floor pattern logic.

In the same square, outside the platform environment, the pavement is the same red-color-paving stone as the one placed in the roadways in the regeneration process of 9 de Octubre and Pedro Carbo avenues, thus avoiding making boundaries between the square and the pavement, which helps to enlarge the space perception within the building fronts of the surroundings. This pavement inside the square is also supplemented by a stone plot whose orientation is orthogonal to the facades and the urban plot, setting the urban furniture and new trees accordingly, the number was considerably increased, in response to the citizens’ progressive estrangement with regard to nature.

A degraded area in front of the square was recovered as complement; here, a fountain ensemble with space for outdoors tables and chairs was designed the space would be outsourced to a cafeteria.