Riouxa Park

This landscape intervention aimed to transform 60 000m² of former agricultural land into an urban park within easy reach of the city. On the outskirts of Vigo, in the popular district of Teis, the terrain extends in a gentle slope towards the estuary.

The Taller’s concept of the Mediterranean public garden developed for this project is clearly based on the Arab garden approach to building a natural equilibrium between availability and design. This adds another symbolic facet inspired by the Roman understanding of public spaces as a place for meeting, with distinct hierarchies of effect, ranging from the mythical great house of columns and steps to the open esplanades of the forum or the protective embrace of the amphitheatre.

The project was thus based on the idea that the park should be an extrapolation of two essentials concepts: the agronomical concept of viability and productivity, carefully relating means to ends, using a well-tested, indigenous range of trees and shrubs, and the concept of symbolic architecture, introducing built space, covered or open, useful or decorative, as a platform for public activities and a means of identity for the surrounding area.

The scheme was designed on the basis of geometric elements, which have been sensitively integrated into the existing vegetation, which in turn favours vast grass lawns and native plants. The geometry captures the axial connotations and influences of its surroundings, traces master lines, orders and divides the space into logical parts responding to the real dimension of viability. The geometry defines the path of the eye and the direction of the space; it turns chaos and obscurity into order and clarity, and combined with the site’s dimensions it gives birth to the parti: a model expressing the moral and aesthetic principles of creativity from which the project stems. Opening onto the river, the green amphitheatre provides a perfect venue for cultural activities.