The flows of movements and possible stays are treated with care or starting from a modulation with variations in their scale and formats, where, for example, they are articulated with ten-centimeter granite slabs placed in a herringbone, favoring the integration of the fragments. The use of granite, its treatment, as well as its modeling in different pieces of urban furniture, specifically designed, exerts a binding function.
Another resource that the remodeling of Los Jardinillos had to identify was water. To replace the meandering and depressed rockery watercourse, a specular sheet of water was designed, which favored symmetry effects with respect to the trees it embraces.
Description of project by Óscar Miguel Ares Álvarez
The public space is the place of relationships, memory and future memory; the place where citizens should enjoy the shared space. Numerous interventions - not always fortunate and with partial perspective - in the area of Los Jardinillos, have caused a distortion in the identity of the park - thought as a reception room for travelers arriving by railroad to Palencia - but also an isolation of the rest of the city.
More than being an area of connection, Los Jardinillos was a frontier park with multiple impediments to be crossed by its neighbors. A public space that had its permeability with the rest of the city repressed; in addition to the train or bus stations since its natural access occurs through it.
The garden, as in many other cities, was abandoned in its maintenance, becoming an inhospitable and dangerous place at dusk, marked by partial interventions without coherence, so that situation had to be reversed.
Structurally, Los Jardinillos is not a park: there are three under a single name, carried out in different phases, whose traces range from romanticism to arbitrary planning; from the 19th century to the 21st. An urban ensemble made from non-cohesive and dysfunctional fragments.
It was necessary to create a warp, a project with a global and integrating vocation, that would solve all functional problems. For this reason, the project - the fruit of the ideas competition called in 2018 - is based on a system of concatenated squares that have the purpose of facilitating the integration of the parts that make up the park.
A restructured garden from different scales of squares with different purposes, with more or less definition in its uses. The main one, "the island", is positioned in front of the train station, recovering the original planning of the large space that existed since 1875 and that was destined to the access of carriages and cars to the railway station.
The unfortunate subsequent interventions altered its original nature, so the project set out to recover that space as a multifunctional pedestrian plaza; a sort of intermediate, indefinite place, as a support or scenography for the activities that citizens demand, in accordance with that maxim of architecture understood as support for the theater of life.
Next to it, other squares are added: the one of the roads, a crossroads of roads where the future cafeteria will rest; that of the bus plaza, which dignifies the entrance to the city; that of youth leisure, in which skateboarding and park curl activities take place; as well as others on a smaller scale that are arranging the park as a fabric that interweaves the parts using sewing techniques.
The use of granite, its treatment, as well as its modeling in different pieces of urban furniture, specifically designed, exerts a binding function. The pavement, resolved from a modulation with variations in its scale and formats, is arranged in ten-centimeter granite slabs arranged in a herringbone pattern; favoring the integration of the fragments.
Another resource that the remodeling of Los Jardinillos had to identify was water. To replace the meandering and depressed rockery watercourse, a specular sheet of water was designed, which favored symmetry effects with respect to the trees it embraces.
These seem to emerge over it, doubling its height or creating endless elongation effects that are lost in the black bottom of the pond. Its position in the park, but also the enabling of its perimeter - flexed where there were trees - as a bench seat causes it to become a meeting point for citizens.
Finally, the large vegetation, and its height, facilitates the shading of the park - with great leafiness in some of the parts - for which we have not considered it convenient to provide the area with complementary shaded areas; respecting all the previously existing trees.
After the restoration, the Gardens are organized according to a double logic that complements each other. Two worlds of opposing natures: the first, horizontal, defined by the solidity that the granite gives it; the second, vertical, typical of the organic condition of its trees.
The proposal is resolved at ground level, without outstanding elements, taking into account universal accessibility; a kind of woven rugs with variable geometries that give rise to different herringbone games.
The will was to promote a place of silence, stillness and rest; a landscaped space that encourages calm and storytelling; where the trees that have risen for dozens of years, cast their shadows and let their leaves settle, from the heights, like colored mats on the new tapestry of granite with a will to persistence.
2015 
2024.
