The Cultural Centre CaixaForum represents the potential of fighting against difficulty, against (pre-existing) constraints. It is built mainly inside a prevailing concrete skeleton that was meant to be an underground parking area.
The project coherently resolves two crucial issues when dealing with existing buildings: accommodating the new uses and making them visible (even being underground).
The house is located in the Nervión neighborhood of Seville, within an urban fabric where all kinds of individual and collective dwellings currently coexist. Our plot is narrow and deep, between party walls, with a single facade to the street 7 m wide.
The owner’s initial wish was to have a rooftop garden for family enjoyment. Instead, it was decided to place the desired garden as a unitary part of the daytime area of the house, the whole occupying the entire first floor, from the open patio at the back of the plot, to the access street, to the one that leans out and looks.
The need to host a multi-purpose program and to offer the most appropriate specificity and dimension to each of the uses, has generated the two superimposed layouts that organize the structure of the new building. On one hand, two four-storied buildings that have a cross-span of 19,50 metres spread along the longest side of the building site. The most representative uses are carried out there, the disposition of the classrooms creating a landscaped patio. Superimposed on this structure, there is a more arbitrary, two-storied structure with a 10- metres cross-span. The departments are situated in this other structure, which generates a shading element above the patio. The façade is continuous and is covered with a single material, thus providing unity to the whole.
Operating within an uneven and lengthened plot (with a 2,20m facade) located in the city centre of Seville was not the only starting restriction, there was also a derelict steel structure, abandoned some years before by the previous landlord, which had to be reused and integrated on the project, even if it was thought for a quite dissimilar program.
Additionally, the space located at the bottom of the plot, theoretically expected to be a garden, was surrounded by constructions far higher than the house, seriously compromising the privacy of this area.
Hotel and Restaurant in the ancient Montalván Pottery Factory.
The Montalván Pottery Factory finished its production as a ceramic’s factory in 2012. After its closure and new acquisition, it has been transformed for a new use: Hotel and Restaurant.
Alberto Campo Baeza explained in an article about his Casa Gaspar that the architect must be like a doctor. A good one, that listens attentively to the patient and makes all the necessary analyzes to be able to emit a diagnosis based on his knowledge. But if the patient does not trust the doctor's opinion, their skills are useless. The same thing happens to architects.
That's why this assignment has been especially comforting for us. The property invited us to their home designing contest, by giving us detailed information abour their needs. This information, added to what we could rescue from a couple of meetings and visits to the plot, allowed us to develop a freely proposal. It was about making an accurate diagnosis based on the previous analyzes.
This delightful little locale where the culinary workshop takes place has a particular volume in which everything relates to the central cast-iron column that presides over the premises. From the bleak light that seeps through the two façade openings and in from the backyard, we can see the powerful brickwork walls that reveal the constructional history of the building located in this historic city, in Boteros Street, an old word meaning wineskins were sold there and whose etymology is partly recovered with this locale’s latest venture.
The project was commissioned to design a house for 1-2 people in a commercial space located on the ground floor of a residential building of four floors, addressing its realization through comprehensive reform.
The construction of the building in which it is located dates back to the year 1970 and is representative of the architecture of the time, presenting a facade free of superimposed ornament whose composition is resolved by the construction elements themselves. On both sides adjoins residential buildings of more traditional architectural language, coexistence of styles that can be seen along the street, located in the heart of Triana. This being one of the most representative of the most traditional Seville, with low-rise buildings for housing and specific small-scale shops on the ground floor of them.
Sympatique is a project born of a couple passionate about pashminas. In their search of new projects and adventures they decide to found this shop with original pashminas, with unique prints and exclusive fabrics.
Estepa is a small town 110km east of Seville (Spain). It is in the centre of Andalusia and well connected to Seville or Malaga, by the A-92 highway or its branches.
The project began by carrying out an extensive analysis of the area which identifies the flow of traffic and its connections with the A-92 highway. The avenue where we are located in, a major road axis that still maintains the character of the old main street that was, connects with the highway in two important intersections on the west and on the northeast sides of the town.
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