This is a contextualist project. The experience of living in the Albaicin quarter brought into a piece of contemporary architecture.There is an obvious connection between traditional and modern architecture, which the project would reach by assimilating the roots and the language of the context. Those values that can be only discovered by using, experiencing and knowing the neighborhood in the dialogical experience of quotidian life.
In this same sense, architecture can listen to the discours of the context and give it continuity without breaking up with contemporary, learn and understand the language of real context and speak it today in a contemporanean form.
In the conceptual terrain of meiterranean traditional popular neighbourhoods, like the Albaicin (Granada, Spain), a “way of life” gravitate towards the ignorance (and curiosity) of visitors, making way though this tissue if intimacy, and the knowledge and complicity of those who there inhabit. As well as the neighborhood, the building asks the visitor for an active knowledge and at same time suggests its mystery, inviting those who want to experience it, to unravel it and make it own, and rejecting those who does not admit the game, turning for them into a char labyrinth.
Opacity and visibility. Compactness and fragmentary. Public dimensions and domestic scale. Privacy and shared urban spaces. Hiding and showing. . Silent garden and children’s voices in the square. Quiet streets through the urban mass, while music comes from an anonymous window. Improvised singularities bringing up the specific urban plan. Comprehension and experience. The curiosity of visitors and the copmplicity of those who know. Rationalism and sensuality…
…Intimism and knowledge.
