Unidad Diseño

  • Zócalo Urban Design

    1999.

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  • Zócalo Urban Design

    1999.

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  • Zócalo Urban Design

    1999.

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  • Zócalo Urban Design

    1999.

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  • Zócalo Urban Design

    1999.

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  • Zócalo Urban Design

    1999.

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  • Zócalo Urban Design

    1999.

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  • Zócalo Urban Design

    1999.

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Zócalo Urban Design

In the last few years, few competitions created as much expectation as this one, organized by the first democratically elected mayor in the history of Mexico City. The competition was his administration´s spectacular positive action to give a new physiognomy to the most important public square in the country, to symbolize a golden era. With great enthusiasm and motivated by the important challenge, we put together a multi-disciplinary group for an in-depth study of the project. We carried out an urban morphology study of the square and its surroundings, of the street network, of the façade styles, of existing trees, of monuments, vehicular and pedestrian flows, urban equipment, and of course the site history, from pre-Hispanic times up to the present.

Our proposal a great public square covered in water jets, taking the dimensions from the facades of the Cathedral and the Sagrario, allowing for a great diversity in uses, from a dry square, to a water-covered surface, with different combinations of water jet play.

In this way, the project recalls the city’s original setting in a lake basin. We proposed a restaurant and coffeeshop corridor on the western side of the square, shaded by three rows of jacarandas, to provide a space from where to contemplate the best colonial building in America – the Metropolitan Cathedral. The proposed pavement was concrete made with stone aggregate from quarries in the state of Oaxaca. Our project was amongst 15 projects chosen for a final stage of further development.

          
        
        

Project information

  • Zócalo, México D.F
  • 1999