Pasaia Fish Market

Location: Pasaia, Spain

Client: Pasaia Port Authority

Date: 2009 (1st prize) Competition

Area: 21,500 m²

Budget: €15 million

Team credits:

Partner in charge: Alejandro Zaera-Polo

Competition Team: Robert Berenguer, Daniel Spreier, Pep Wennberg, David Prado, Daniel Prado, Diego Nebra and Manuel Távora

The Pasaia Fish Market considers the problem of how to articulate conflicting program requirements, resulting from an overlap between public functions and industrial functions, in a limited area. Although these program requirements might seem contradictory at first, our design enables them to be harmoniously blended, as well as for the traditional fishing activities of the Pasaia harbour to be preserved rather than renouncing these facilities to make way for public use. This design, which maintains industrial functions while opening the area to public, is an unprecedented solution to port regeneration.

We hope that our project will provide a model for harbour regeneration, which has been insufficiently explored elsewhere, by treating industrial and leisure activities as activities which can reinforce and complement each other. By keeping the ground level exclusively for fishing operations and elevating the public space to the roof, the project provides a simple solution to the intersection and adjacency of industrial activities and public use. In addition to providing a technical solution to this, the use of different levels in our proposal mirrors the existing topographic conditions in Pasaia, largely determined by Mount Ulia.

Urban public space does not necessarily have to be flat, or at ground level: in this instance, variations in height have provided a way to extend and cherish those topographic qualities of Pasaia’s landscape and natural surroundings which form the identity of its existing urban space.

Another constraint of the project was the need to retain the ice factory in its current position to avoid the unnecessary expense of removing or replacing it. The most active public space in Pasaia is located just in the north of the future Fish Market, adjacent to the current position of the ice factory. Through emphasising the volume of the ice factory, we aim to enhance the monumentality and visibility of the complex.