Our proposal aims at complying with the competition brief and going beyond it to offer the people of Santa Cruz a possibility of having a real community center.
In order for that to be possible it is important that the YWLC provide an urban feeling to its users, a sense of being somewhere. Part of that has to do with spatial focus as wel as with tridimensional definition. To achieve this two decisions were taken: firstly, to divide the program into three buildings and to treat the playing pitches and their accompanying fences as another 3D volume; secondly, to distribute these four elements around the periphery of the site, thus generating a central void, an open public space which will serve for community gatherings and facilitate the diagonal crossing of the site. Hopefully, this space will function as the public square that is lacking in this neighborhood.
Another crucial decision refers to the building materials and techniques: prefabrication wherever possible and no facing (and thus exposure of all service elements), aiming at a quick and almost maintenance free solution, at least as far as the built elemnts are concerned.
Throughout the project our goals were: enhancement of the user’s quality of life, sustainability, legibility, ease of use, feasible construction.

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