Facing Parque Federal and La Redonda, Santa Fe’s former railway corridor was a void: an edge of blank walls between neighbourhoods, schools, community centres and heritage buildings that turned their backs on each other. The proposal reads it the other way round, not as marginal land but as the piece that can bring them back together.
The idea
Reactivating the railway tracks as a framework for contemporary life. The tracks are kept and reused as the route of a tram, a sustainable and intermodal transport system, together with an extension of the cycle lane network. The promenade stitches together two city corridors: the northern green corridor linking El Molino, Parque Federal and Parque Norte, and the rail-and-port axis that reaches the Costanera and Parque Garay.
Heritage with new uses
Rather than replacing the railway buildings, the project recognises them as pieces of identity and gives them a programme. The signal box, raised and highly visible, becomes a museum and lookout. The railway house and its small square become workshops and play spaces for children. The corner house becomes a flexible meeting place: community hall, tourist information point or neighbourhood library. The Independence Bridge, now a cycle path, acts as the gateway to the route.
A place without a fixed programme
At the centre, a light, permeable structure covered in planting holds a minimal programme: public toilets, storage, a neighbourhood café and a stage that can be opened up or closed off as needed. Beneath it, the same floor works as a bar, dance floor, market, school event space or long table for food gatherings between the city’s immigrant communities.
Opening up the edge
The neighbouring school’s blank wall is replaced by a translucent one and a new entrance forecourt, and the Dom Polski bar is extended towards the promenade. The project also proposes an urban code allowing party walls to become new façades, so neighbours can open their homes onto the park. That regulatory move matters as much as the architectural ones: it changes how the edge is lived.
Landscape
Native planting, permeable surfaces, shaded pedestrian routes and resting areas, always at neighbourhood scale.
The competition
We developed the entry, submitted under the name Memoria Colectiva (Collective Memory), jointly with Cooperativa Archivo for the Paseo de las Colectividades Competition, organised by the Santa Fe College of Architecture and Urbanism, District 1. The team was Bernardo María Bertone, Pedro Ignacio Chiconi, Lautaro Gaibes, Lara Figueroa, Matías Salomón, Pablo Pennino, Marco Zampieron, Juan Manuel Pachue and Analía Belén Nieva. It received an Honourable Mention, presented at the College alongside members of the City Council. For us, entering public competitions is a way of thinking about the city beyond the commission, and of testing ideas that then find their way back into our everyday work.
