Granada School of Architecture
Nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award 2017.
This complex was formed through a protracted transformation process during more than five hundred years that started with the existence of a Nasrid house, continued in the sixteenth-century with the construction of the “Admiral’s house” and was gradually added onto until the twentieth-century. Finally it was a monumental building, occupying an entire city block and overwhelming the small scale of its surroundings. The compound’s structure was adequate to house Granada’s new Architecture School; however an intervention was required to clarify the unity of the complex, not in a stylistic sense, but as an exercise in integration. In this heterogeneous composite there are elements that have specific architectural values together with others that have none. This intervention hopes that the tension generated between authentic elements from the past and new elements from the present will impregnate the rest in a way that helps the whole finally discover an architectural destiny. In this new phase the construction is the catalyzing agent of a new “whole”, recognizing the materiality of each era and the light as the basic integrating principles of the historic process.
