Fernanda & Bernarda

Utrera, 2004-2005

A public space the color red.

The city council decided to place an existing figurative sculpture honoring the flamenco singers Fernanda and Bernarda in a space at the edge of the historic center. The project brief was literally to set the monument in a roundabout and to reshape one of the sidewalks.

We turned the sidewalk into a small square and the roundabout into an illusion of a garden. Both elements interact beyond the tyranny of traffic, playing with scales, textures and geometries. The roundabout, an object of desire, overlays outlines, water, vegetation, textures and 105 pots that provide scale and identity to the place besides a self-sufficient and sustainable “technology”. The square generates public space. It is crossed by a long bench (length 26 meters, width 1 meter) which materializes pedestrian flows, envelops the play area, creates a meeting point, looks to the garden and provides for the appropriation, free use and daily reinvention of this public space.

The use of the color red reveals the potential that soft features have in the urban environment, and takes into account chromatics as a design variable applied to public space in southern Spain. Ceramic pieces, natural stone, vegetation, stucco and paint, all of which incorporate this color naturally or artificially, tint the atmosphere. Red pays homage to flamenco (passion and tragedy) and is connected to car culture (Ferrari as an ideal; the color of traffic signs). It is also a color used traditionally in local domestic spaces, which in this case is taken to the urban scale.