Integral Territorial Center of the Commonwealth of Olivenza
The Sierra de Alor, in peninsular south-west, is a volcanic formation of dark stone, slaty schists, mass of granitic rock and the hard local metamorphic rock known as “burned marble".
Between the hillsides of unstable moraines and the fertile plains of the nearby river Guadiana there concentrates Olivenza, a city shut up in the belt of his Vauban wall just exceeded very recently with horizontal, anarchic, modern growths. Between watchtowers, the mountain range of Alor mentioned, the towers of San Jorge and of San Benito of the Contest, the tower of the Bucket of Olivenza's Castle, the project is placed. In the project’s production process, the exiguous plot meets surrounded with gradual form by an always increasing housings magma in low density.
Action-reaction. We choose for the concentration. CIT (Territorial Integral Center) bets for deep, anachronistic modality: the dark rock of the mountain, the volumes of the defensive towers, the gathered, together stones, in a carved field, the fresh hall of the Extremaduran house.
As a stranded ship in the asymmetric sea of prefabricated tiles of concrete and grills mechanized aside and to other, given the extreme condition of limit of the lot, the distant horizons marked by the agricultural simplification of the vegetation, the building emerges by it and it is constituted in local and urban symbol. As an atlante that gives a vigorous step at the head, the CIT of Olivenza wants to be erected as local community center, offering his ground floor, parking, gardens, classroom, meeting’s room, as public space transferred to the neighborhood essentially.
A project that looks for the promotion of the new technologies in the area, the progress of the natural environments, the economic and managerial promotion, the environmental, ecological conscience and of equality, all radically modern pretensions, must raise from the same building pronounced character of commitment and sincerity. We touch the soil almost on tiptoe, reducing to the maximum the foundation in a slightly favorable area. As answer to the most next environment we propose a blind outline, a building as a rock that is perforated and is opened on the outside of controlled and useful form, although not without certain absorption that denotes concentration and work. On the contrary, the ground floor becomes kind, permeable, invites to enter the building, to cross it, to touch it.
The obliged separation of the plot is even landscaped by means of a green curtain that gives itself to a neighborhood of forzed alignments. The architecture transforms then in a receptacle of sensations where the beginning according to which the interior space must come out towards the exterior has been replaced with the beginning of the indifference: interior and exterior sound the same thing. This way, the architecture approaches the society across sensations, more than across the euclidean geometry... But, are not they the new sensations the application of a new geometry?, a sensory geometry, an endoarchitecture.
The new CIT will present the value of the innovation, of the new uses and of renewed formulae of management and social agreement conducive to the sustainability of the resources of the region in a made building of agreeable, suggestive and germ sensations. It is neither a monument, nor an institutional building. There are neither staircases, nor big foyers nor areas of lost steps. Yes, there is space and matter. Light. Yes there is energetic control and plenty of isolation. Of thermal inertia. There are bioclimatic installations, making the building almost self-sufficient. Trombe walls, refreshing and radiant soil, continuous ventilation, covered garden ecological, tanks…
A piece of vital and effervescent atmosphere compromised to the place and the environment. A full building of critical mass that will have to demonstrate to the visitor and to the user, at the first glance, the close relationship between the man and his activities with the nature and the environment. The space is never neutral, but in the project that we propose the simplicity, to remove what it exceeds, to remain in the bones, it is a strategy, not form. The corporeal and tactile condition of the proposal has something of recovery of original situations that, undoubtedly, were present in the works of those that for the first time faced the construction: an overcoat, a shade, a way, a watchtower, a place in the nature… a bet for the vacuum that is radically contemporary, and, at the same time, subtly anachronistic: there resounds with fund the poem of Evtuchenko, in which in contrast to the call of Rimbaud to be always absolutely modern, , it was recommending to stay slightly anachronistic there been able to be recognized by all the generations, the previous ones and the future ones… Vacuum, courtyards, if, but with a nostalgic accent, a certain anachronism..., like Latour, we were never modern.
