‘HOUSING IN CABO DE GATA’

‘HOUSING IN CABO DE GATA’

Housing in Cabo de Gata is the proposal to develop 6 new dwellings in a volcano in the National Park of Cabo de Gata.

Almeria, Spain 2006.

There were a number of basic criteria that were set as a starting point in this project in order to obtain a clear result:

Provide to the place all the interests of the architecture and meet their climatic and cultural tools with local tradition and all the traditions of other places that are similar for any condition, which we consider useful to solve the problems that the place has.

Try not to design any need to import dummy, our or external to it and save to the project any aesthetic and social potential which is not required.

Deliver the facade material selection to physical effectiveness criteria, (get the best performance – the result with the lowest consumption – effort, i.e. find the lowest possible entropy), and let it arise from the final appearance of the building.

We have sought an architecture for the site, open to the world to collect all knowledge that is useful to your specific situation.

Thus, the references we had in mind as we drew the houses were not only those that correspond to our education:

The house that has a low passage on the street below the village.

The flocks of sheep in summer, which all put close together to get shade each other.

The pitas that keep the humidity down and emerge strongly into the sky.

The traditional towns visited in Almeria.

The houses excavated in a desert of China, we saw in a magazine.

The farmlands on the slopes surrounding the project.

The houses in North African land.

The homes of pavilions and gardens of Zhejiang.

Ventilation arrangements of Hassan Fathy.

Hydraulic mechanisms by Juanelo Turriano.

. . . and an infinity of things, which because of not mentioning their origin, we can not name them and therefore they could seem to be occurrences ours.

In this desert by the sea, vegetation survives mainly on the morning dew, but the soil moist remains until the sun rises or the west wind start to blow. The different plant species, generally agree on a common strategy: to make a very low shadow around their roots hand develop a thick skin to preserve internal moisture.

DESIGN TEAM

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

MODELS
Sergio Alvarez