1st Prize Awarded - Project Workshop IXth Iberoamerican Architecture and Urbanism Biennale

From “contest termns and conditions”: The Paraná Library houses approximately 7,500 volumes in a small railway pavilion - called 1910 - located at the imaginary intersection of Spain Street with the banks of the Paraná River, in a place popularly known as "bajada España," in the Inmigrant Communities Park.
The Paraná Library depends on the Boating Club Bajada España, but is open to public use, and its heritage - which was mainly formed through donations - is made up of books and magazines of all kinds, with an emphasis on the theme of the river and islands, since one of its objectives is to disseminate and revitalize the culture related to the river.
     The site has the necessary strengths for this objective: the exceptional location, the views towards the islands, the character of the existing railway architecture, the flow of people who frequent the place, make up an exceptional opportunity that remains untapped.      The objective of the Workshop is to generate proposals aimed at expanding the library, creating new reading spaces and enhancing the existing architecture.
By the authors: Rosario displays a heterogeneous succession of interventions on the public space that goes along its ten miles of riverside. Each recovered old railway building becomes a  transformed equipment that accentuates the differences of an architecture shared similar features in origin, yet that with each intervention at the time, aspiring to become particular, tries to compete with the main element of the coastal park which is by nature the river.
     The formulated proposal for the library seeks to vindicate the original precepts of architect Villafañe when designing public space; to free the park's practicable plane, reinterpret the site's memory; and link the requested equipment with the event that the riverbank is. But a visual approach to the river excludes a vast variety of other approaches to this great fissure in the vast plains of the pampas: the riverbank, the terraces, the water line, the flora, a renewed way of reading in the city, away from noise (Beatriz Suárez); reading in the city, in the river.
     In architectural terms, the project reformulates identitary elements of the old ferroport infrastructure; the cultural refuge library as a tunnel of the railway, the expansions as elevating sleeves in which the riverfront is called to participate as an experience and not as a framed landscape; the brick as the constitutive material of the area's history’s identity; the containment wall as an infinite book-shelf; heritage railway buildings at level zero as callers; the river as the protagonist of a careful succession of concealments, suggestions and revelations.