Zaragoza's food market square has always turned out to be the scene of social and political events in the city, accumulating among the architectures that it contains agreat patrimonial and monumental value that today serves as a distraction to what never became part of it, what is relegated to insignificance, which this project intends to recover.

An almost Roman Theater is the re-interpretation of a complex fragment of Zaragoza, an abandoned house building without a facade in front of the old Roman wall. It is atimely enhancement of the insignificance of urban objects forgotten in time that tend to recompose the previous history of the city through its fragments.

The projects rethinks the reconversion of a housing building into an "urban house", a theatre where everything can happen and where everyone is invited. Three main potential qualities define the attitude of the project and the tools with which the new theatre will be developed:

1. 6 old staircases: As holes in every floor, the old staircases of the housing building will be very useful to place the new structure, and build 6 new big reinforced pillars that will not only cover the theatre, but also relief the weight of the old upper floors and turn it into new ones.

2. the big void: the old trapezoidal courtyard that divided de building before, willnow congregate people around it, creating the new audition hall of the theatre. To regulate acoustic conditions, a new technological awning will be created, as thosefrom the old marketplace. Placing below him the new grades, the amphitheaters, and focusing the attention into the final exercise, the uncovering of the wall that divides the indoors of the theater from the rest of the city.

3. the blind wall as a face: the original building remains cut and without a clear façade, advertisements are the only qualification that appear on it. This last movement will turn this wall into a new face for the building, a big urban door, andso will create the new link to the city in which the indoors will become a new public square, and the outdoors and the marketplace will become a new part of the representation for the theatre.

An Almost Roman Theater is, like an exercise, a virtual plane to understand the city beyond its physical limits, now transcending the foreseeable, to obtain from the versatility of its possible uses, a new real construction for Zaragoza, a small fortress fictional.

KOOZ What prompted the project?

MGLS Probably, it was just as innocent as taking the tram one day next to the Central Market of Zaragoza and realizing that right in front of the tram stop was a huge advertisement covering a party wall that seemed to have been there for a long time. The intense investigation around the Central Market surroundings, its history, and the different stages of time that starred in the construction and transformation of that site revealed a complete game board of elements, architectures and urban interventions that have prompted this place to be what nowadays is. Not a place itself, nor a non-place. In this mestizo panorama, the key was to understand the right words that could redefine what the Central Market square of Zaragoza used to be, understand its limits and transcend them. For me this word was theatre, but I believe it could have been so many others, I only had to find an excuse to transform the site radically.

KOOZ What questions does the project raise and which does it address?

MGLS While the project was on going and once it was finished, people raised different types of questions in relation to its ideas, design proposals and strategies, prompting interpretations and perspectives that I was not taking into account. So maybe this part of the question is for the ones who now will visit KoozArch and extract their own conclusions about my project.

What I definitely know is what sort of questions, also in relation to those who other people raised from it and told me once, I would like to address with this almost roman theatre:

- About heritage, the iconic one, the weight we give to it in our cities nowadays and that heritage we are not paying attention to, abandoned, ruined, or just forgotten, but not useless. The hidden party wall of an abandoned building can mean more than just demolition.

- About designing virtual boundaries and re-interpreting material ones. Work with the context not as a restraint but as a puzzle. Transgress the urban morphology with the invisible and the visible. A crossover of squares, the virtual and performative and the real and daily one.

- About matter. The different forms in which we can compose it to design our context. Shapes forming a new grammatic.

KOOZ How does the project approach and re-interpret the role and definition of the theatre today?

MGLS I think the point was not to re-interpret the role of the theatre, but to understand it as a performative space in all of its possibilities and use it intentionally as a medium to foster new urban relations and radical transformations of the building, it is an alibi. The trespassing of the fourth wall behind the stage, here as a moving façade/party wall, triggers a new imaginary that I want to put in practice in this Central Market square that now comes into the building as another urban corner for the city.

KOOZ How does the project insert itself within the cultural and historical fabric of the city?

MGLS Linking to the previous question, I like to see how the cultural and historical fabric of the city inserts itself in the project. A non-extremely qualified space like an audition hall, conceived like a big void inside the building with big grades on it, transforms itself into an urban square where the daily fabric of the market, the historical quartier of the city and the everyday life of it, flows in. When the door is open, the incoming city life in conjunction with the performativity of the representation space requalifies not only the indoors but transforms the current urban context into something else, an added value, with the “garage door” facade as a mediator of heterogeneous programmatic relations.

KOOZ What informed the visual language through which the proposal is explored?

MGLS I wanted to stay a little informal in everything related to the representation of the project. Firstly, avoiding seriousness, because Zaragoza is my hometown and I wanted to transmit what this city’s future could be from my point of view. Secondly, the project also asked for it as every solution designed, structure, building technique and intent, invited me to tousle the traditional ways of representing plans and images/renders to offer a personal perspective. Dreamlike in some parts, a little surrealist, carefree, colorful, these characteristics also ease a lot the conception of different perspectives and approaches.

KOOZ What is for you the power of the image within architectural discipline?

MGLS As architects, we have known from the beginning that traditional drawing is part of our communication tool set. It is the way with which we get more easily in contact to our context, faster than words.

After the project of “An Almost Roman Theatre”, I have had the opportunity to develop an exhibition as head curator in Zaragoza called PRE_IMAGINARIOS2020. From the beginning we had the purpose of considering this moment we are living as an opportunity to re-write our narratives as architects, introducing the architectural language to the city and the open public through a vast collection of images. Plans, sketches, renders and visual documents made by architecture students and professional studios were exhibited offering a collective imaginary of the future in post-2020 cities. Suddenly the notion of imaginary became fundamental to understand this common field in which we can all relate to talk about what surrounds us and the cities we live in. Images are not only condensers of information, but also a great visual synthesis to explain ourselves some concepts.

I believe images need to communicate and to offer solutions, to adapt grammatic between different interlocutors and to uprise ideas and install them as a real possibility in some other’s minds. Speak without words, explain without sentences.

Bio

Manuel García-Lechuz Sierra is a Madrid-based architect graduated at the School of Engineering and Architecture of Zaragoza. Masters degree with honors at the Technical University of Madrid ETSAM (UPM) in 2019. Teaching assistant at Projects Design Department during 2018-2019 school year (ETSAM) with Professor Federico Soriano, and currently working as an architect in estudioHerreros (Madrid), architecture office directed by ETSAM and Columbia University Prof. Juan Herreros. Also interested in art and painting and curatorial work, Manuel has been the Head curator of architecture exhibition PRE_IMAGINARIOS2020 in Zaragoza and exhibited his artwork as invited artist in Festival ASALTO 2020 in Zaragoza.