Excerpt: The Garden of Intersections by Studio Ossidiana is an inhabitable tribute to the soils of Rioja, transforming the city’s ground into a sequence of mineral-filled rooms. Framed by garden walls, each room celebrates a different soil type, blurring together through play, exploration, and interaction. More than an installation, it becomes a living canvas and later an open-air classroom for learning and imagination.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] We imagined for the Concentrico Festival an inhabitable tribute to the soils of the city and of its territory – the Rioja region – a sequence of mineral-filled rooms, where to play, dig, or draw on the ground itself. Each room is dedicated to a soil type, framed within a hedge-like garden wall: ferrous soils, volcanic gravel, and clay-rich substrate populate the rooms, meeting at their intersection, and producing new grounds.
Within it, we can be gardeners or geographers, look for buried treasures or just lay on loose materials under the sun, while the soils mix through daily explorations, through the acts of drawing, and with the movement of guests. The Garden of Intersections brings to the center of the city the very ground it stands on, the undomesticated matter which preceded its bricks, its portals, its walls, homes, and churches, not as a monument, but as a canvas.
Following Concentrico Festival, the installation became an experimental classroom for the Centro educacion Infantil las Gaunas: there, for the months or years to come, it will be an open-air pavilion for listening, talking, or gardening, where to build new intersections between teaching and learning, exploring and learning, gardening, and playing.
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