You Make Your Way on Foot

Guille de Alfonso, ETSAV 2017-18

Tutors: Pere Buil and Josep Giner

GdA We are located on the top of the mountain of Olerdola. Rocks, wind, stones and vegetation surround this space. Several different civilizations have passed through this site, it contains remains from the Bronze Age, Iberian, Roman and medieval periods.

A shelter, an archaeological interpretation center, an exhibition-warehouse space for the discoveries found at the site and an area to rest and eat are the main elements of the program. The placement of the program is intended to guide one through the different stages of the site; sorting them and giving them hierarchy in the face of their disorder.

The reconstruction of the archaeological elements is not the strategy chosen to explain the site. Experiential learning is the approach adopted. One learns about the site by walking through it. Through the body, which is what we anatomically share with the people who inhabited it, and the landscape; the project intends to narrate the temporality of the mountain. Emphasizing the stone as a material that has made possible the construction of this place. From its removal to its placement.

The project aims to recuperate the previous agricultural landscape. The territory is recognized through its terraces. The roofs of the buildings become topography and their skylights new reference elements. As well as various walls that are placed in the environment, being elements that provide scale to the territory.

In terms of materiality, black concrete is chosen. The architecture grants dark spaces and monumental entity, adding value on the landscape and its surroundings. The material is barely treated, making it deteriorate over time, and gradually wearing down into the landscape. Part of the structure reflects the elements and holes formed in the stone during time in these mountains.

The architectural complex is placed in the site to become a new landscape. Different elements are situated in the territory as if they were vestiges of a past or future, granting a new scale to the environment. Thus becoming a future ruin.