Toby Eccleston

Plaza de Mercado Grande borders Ávila’s eastern wall at a confluence of routes that connect a community of monasteries within and beyond the medieval city. As the traditional location of the weekly market, histories and memories of Ávila were inscribed into its surface, a record now lost beneath Rafael Moneo’s municipal office complex and underground car park - built despite outcry from local community and international heritage organisations.

The Civic Monastery offers redress by unearthing the generous civic potential beneath the Plaza’s surface. A varied programme of public spaces, informed by the typologies of the medieval monastery and carefully entangled in the concrete skeleton of Moneo’s now ruined intervention, invite the city’s voices back into the Mercado Grande through the housing of a new cast of citizens, organisers and craftspeople.

The existing market is accommodated within the former car park, alongside more permanent stalls. Above, cradled by the concrete skeleton, a guildhall overlooks the landscape, supporting community gatherings and mercantile negotiations. Productive activity, in the form of a flour mill, laundry and jeweller’s workshop, inhabit the empty office buildings, alongside dormitories for visiting craftspeople. An auction house, densely packed with furniture, art and relics collected from the city, sits at the base of the western door of the church of San Pedro. By night, the light of projected films escapes from a community cinema.

Standing over the Plaza in a new bell tower, a wandering statue of Santa Teresa surveys the daily life and changing seasons of the civic monastery.

This Project was developed alongside Dan Anderson and Peter Brewser.