MUSA: mottos and muses
Every project is a new adventure!
What moves us is the excitement towards the voids to be filled. From the necessities others require to be covered, the places that it seems no one has been before, through the multiple lacks we find in our discipline, the gap we try to jump and the space we need to develop our emotions; it seems that what puts us in motion is not what fulfils us but what unveils an empty space in front of our eyes.
Sometimes we come across the concept responding to a given context (as the Public Housing we have just finished in Madrid). Sometimes we incubate the project in a laboratory and look desperately for the proper place to implement it (as the libraries we have design for Barcelona, the Canary Islands and the Helsinki Central Library). Sometimes the point of departure is not even ours (as in the Play-time Apartments). Of course, we don’t work in the outer space. Acrobatics are exciting but not a way of sustainment. Every sketch unveils genealogy lines, enrolls and dismiss actors, opens and closes narratives and summons memories and attachments. Some things become explicit, while others run unconsciously. We simply try to clean our mind out of prejudices or preconceived thoughts and put all our resources to best sustain the initiative to be constructed.
Or to sum up, always keep the feet on the ground and the mind pointing the sky.
This is a unique district library, located in a dense urban node of the city of Barcelona, which is presented as a sculptural volume inspired by stacked blocks of books and seated on a square slightly elevated above the street and whose large gaps and voids dialogue with the environment. The access arcade extends the…