‘CHERRY BLOSSON PALACE’

‘CHERRY BLOSSON PALACE’

Cherry Blossom Palace is the proposal to develop a modern chapel -a building that forges an intense bond with the landscape through its presence, its position, its volume and its material- for the Cherry Blossom Festival, halfway between a traditional procession, a rave and a pagan, Dionysian celebration of the fruits of the Earth.

Jerte Valley, Caceres, Spain 2008.

There are times of informal formalism, of relocation, of renunciation of dialogue with the context, which is not taken into consideration even to contradict it: it is simply ignored. That is a time without place. However, the landscape should not grow by mere undifferentiated accumulation of built volumes and constructed surfaces but should be done through the significant aggregation of places, that is, of sites with character.

We imagine the cherry blossom festival in the sense that it has for the Japanese tradition, as a party abroad, a ritual of contact with nature at its most delicate moment and as a metaphor for the ephemeral existence, since cherry trees They remain in bloom just one or two weeks a year.

For us, the celebration is rather a picnic under the flowers, a position from which the contemplation of its delicate lightness is allowed. Hence the effort of the project to conserve the land as intact as possible. The focus of our intentions is to consolidate its pre-existing structure, support and consolidate it to ensure its permanence for a long time.

The position of the building is key in the approach of the project and the invasion of the landscape with a built volume that exceeds the scale of the existing has been avoided. It is located in the encounter of the road with the cut of the road, on the edge of the property, in such a way that it is the same retaining wall of the land which, when folded, generates the two largest rooms, at the level of the highway the auditorium, in the middle floor the multipurpose room and the offices; all this develops a height that keeps it hidden from a superior position in the lot; It is crowned with a cafeteria-restaurant that emerges on the ground with the scale of the buildings that already occupy the landscape.

DESIGN TEAM

Sergio Álvarez architects as ZONA architects, in collaboration with Cesar Cabanas

MODELS
Sergio Alvarez