Building a social utopia. Expansion of NGO Fundesplai.
Building a social utopia. Expansion of NGO Fundesplai.
The project for the Fundació Esplai and its location in the troubled San Cosme district in Baix Llobregat began with the construction of its administrative headquarters, a first hostel, a sports hall and some spaces for training.
The foundation is intended to offer social inclusion and environmental conservation, all with a clear desire for sustainability.
Its tremendous social work focuses on families in situations of marginalisation, and particularly the children of these families, offering them the chance to stay in holiday centres in natural settings all over Catalonia. It also builds hostels and nature education centres and provides soup kitchens and catering for schools.
The building of additional facilities alongside its main headquarters has now begun. They include sports halls and multi-use rooms, an extension of the initial hostel to 450 places, a large training room, a forum for debates and a planned “Museum of Tomorrow”, which will deal with the area of “sustainable nutrition, the fight against climate change, social inclusion and, above all, phenomena that disrupt the future of our society”.
Among these new facilities, we present the new classroom and the space for meetings and debates, which have now been completed. An elliptical agora, like the one drawn by Hypatia of Alexandria, in the 5th century, as a geometric space in which the sum of the distances from each point to the foci always remains constant. That is the starting point for a place for training and debate.
The classroom is related to the other buildings in the complex, forming a Mediterranean cloister garden, flanked by a water park that will show the route of the water of the Baix Llobregat to the sea. This will complement the initial facilities – a site intended to serve people, and especially children.
“Childhood summers are the homeland of dreams". Josep Gassó (Founder of Fundació Catalana de l’Esplai)
