The Collegium is a new actor that integrates and activates the history and community of Arévalo, located in the Ávila Province, in the north of Madrid. As a communal building block, the Collegium fits into an historical complex declared as cultural heritage with a former monastery and a cultural site. The design links the historic buildings through new smaller scale volumes that will host many different types of cultural environments as forums for artistic expression.
Art here is a language that is explored in its many facets, from archiving, to exhibiting, Art becomes the conversation between this build - ing and the inhabitants of the town, the architecture tries to enrich the dialectic of its history to propose a future for the town of 8,000 inhabitants that will include the local knowledge on arts and crafts, cuisine and its different chapters of his- tory. The historic memory of the Ávila Province is based on official scriptures, which describe Arévalo’s seventeenth cen - tury Jesuit complex. In these writings, the floor plan of the old Real Colegio del Espiritu Santo de la Compañia de Jesús in Salamanca is mentioned as a precedent for the layout of the building.
On this base, we developed a hypothesis of the com- pound’s layout, where the church and the college are mediated through the central cloister, the same element that is repur - posed for a contemporary use in the design. With this proposal, different historic buildings are connected to new additions of smaller scale. The result is a patchwork where the old and the new meet, and where visitors are able to discover each space of the complex little by little accompanied by a landscaped garden. The ensemble takes up the scale and density of the historic city, as well as the concept of condensing the interstices of the old monastery through a strategy of contemporary use. In these spaces, past and present enter into dialogue and merge into a concrete act of architectural intervention.
