Production
. Research . Art presents
itself as a new detonator, which integrates and renders active the
municipality of Arévalo and its history. Within a historic site
declared cultural heritage, we decided to link the historic buildings
through new smaller scale volumes to host the Adrastrus Collection.
The
historic memory provided by the cultural patrimony of the Ávila
Province, is based on official scriptures which describe Arevalo’s
seventeenth century Jesuit complex. These scriptures mention of the
plan of the old Real Colegio del Espiritu Santo de la Compañia de
Jesús in Salamanca as a precedent for the building’s plan.
From
this we developed a hypothesis of the compounds layout, where the
church and the college are mediated through the central cloister, the
same element which is repurposed for a contemporary use in our
architectural proposal.
With
this proposal different historic buildings are connected to new
additions of a smaller scale. The result is a patchwork of
experiences between the old and the new in which the visitor
discovers each space of the complex little by little mediated by a
landscaped garden. The building
then
assumes and emulates the density of the historic town through a
strategy of a contemporary use of the cloister. Thought the spaces,
past and present engage in dialogue and synthesize in a concrete act
of architectural intervention.
Despite
the fragmented vision of the ensemble, the result is continuous
amidst the new and the ancient. The visitor will discover each space
and envision the complex as a whole while traversing the
multi-leveled garden that surrounds it. In this project, the ensemble
takes upon the scale and density of the historic city and the concept
of silting the interstitial space of the ancient cloister. Present
and past merge spatially, and observe each other from one another.
