date: 2007
client: Europan 9
status: competition / FIRST PRIZE
typology: public space / commercial
location: Opatija / Croatia
area: 2000 m2 +
authors: SLAS

Beach, promenade, plaza-three public spaces-each with their own culture and users coalesce on the site in
Opatija. The plaza marks a new civic departure for the city which until now it has never had such an urban
space at this scale. Unfortunately the chosen site is severed by busy road from the vibrant public realm of
the beach and bay. Public Bay explores the formal and cultural conflicts between these culturally divergent
public spaces and the potential of their coexistence.It is based on a primeval and ecological way of
occupation-by path. This strategy doesn’t seek to reorder the built urban fabric so much as simply draw the
forces that are already there. The existing fragmented promenade is reinvigorated by intensification of
program to become the mediating element between the beach and the city. This meanders across the busy
road, encircling and defining the new multilayered urban square: three facades marked by the boardwalk,
the fourth a window to the beach and the Kvarner bay beyond. Proposed program beneath the promenade
diversifies the dull and homogeneous tracts of hotels. The square is a station along the path of the 11km long
Lungomare boardwalk and his sustainable tourist potential. Public Bay draws the three core public spaces of
Opatija together. It shares and fairly distributes their spatial potential and intensifies the relationship
between them: between the locals and tourists, spaces of void and movement, and the city and natural
coastal environment