Architect: Javier Peña. Xpiral

With this project of the “House among the pines” Irreversible publishers begins the collection of Micrographic books. This first monograph is the story of the project complete, understanding this as a process that leads us through a complex sequence (and irreversible) decision-making. In the micrography, ww radiography projects, in this case an Xpiral project, led by the architect Javier Pena.

The result was encapsulates in a publication with

336 pages, more than 700 color images and 92 graphics

. Entire planimetry is redraw to scale. The photographs are made to spin an argument that develops along with graphical production itself that the study generates in the process of the project.

In this book there are collaborators like Iñaki Ábalos (www.abalos-sentkiewicz.com), catedrático of Architect Proyects ETSAM, Pedro Medina (www.abreelojo.com), Philosopher and art critic, head of the Instituto Europeo di Design. In addition to Juan Antonio Rodriguez (www.arqtopsia.com), architect, who has been in charge of reprocessing of 3D models of line, for better understanding of the project.

JAVIER PEÑA GALIANO (Murcia, 1966). Architect by the ETSAM in 1992. Since 2001 he is Associate Professor of Architectural Projects at the School of Architecture in Alicante. In 1997 he founds XPIRAL Architecture. As head of this team he is in charge of supervising the development of proposals that explore alternatives to non-disciplinary problems, involving new technologies and multimedia resources but go beyond architecture, urbanism and design. He has travelled widely. He has participated in round tables, conferences and meetings, like VIII Biennale of Architecture in Venice, the recent exhibition On-Site on Spanish Architecture at MOMA, New York, also shown in the Botanical Garden in Madrid. He has lectured in other international events: V Biennale of Architecture and Design in Sao Paolo, 2003; Workshop of Architecture, University of Alcala, 2004; 7 Ideas of Beauty, Madrid, 2005; Talent and Spirit, Santander, July 2005. He has been honoured with numerous awards. Most outstanding are: Europan 6 Prize; Second ATEG Prize, 2006; First Prize for I Contest of the Municipal Pool of Mazarron, Murcia, 2006; First Prize Barrio de la Paz, Murcia, 2006. He has been short-listed twice: FAD, 2000, and SALONI Prizes. He often participates in Architecture and Urbanism competitions organized in the region of Murcia. In this city he lives and develops most of his activity.
Sponsors: Robertson, Vitra, Bulthaup, Gaggenau-neff, Quarta
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Links: Javier Peña Xpiral

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We operate on an old Palace house inhabited by 11 families seeking their space between the old walls of the neighborhood of Pópulo in Cádiz.
The project aims at relocating tenants in a decent way in their estate, dignify their lives without losing their memory. Use the technical advances means and provide the ventilation and lighting necessary to create habitable spaces where before none existed, without falling into the modern standardization and rationalization of the space, learning from the casual and the arbitrary to enrich singularities.
The formal complexity and the initial conditions of this project, intent on preserving the historical values of the house, leads us to: rehabilitate and consolidate the 18th c. and more antique walls (on the ground and first floor); restructure without altering courtyards (according to the regulations); replace the building (on the second floor), and expand in height (setback attic).

Ground and first floors are consolidated. Over them flourishes the new architecture which completes the program and consolidates the morphology of the house.
The need to maintain the same built area, without modifying the height of the facade leads to develop a project that accommodates five decent houses and the premises for a neighbours’ association on the ground floor.
One of the main goals is to recover the street character the arm of the plot connected to the little plaza next to New Cathedral once possessed. It will be a private street, two storeys high, partially covered, ventilated and lit through two courtyards and a hole in the facade. This will allow windows onto the street and permit the creation of an urban landscape inside. With this move the rectangular floor plan that the house had in the eighteenth century, at the height of its splendour, is recovered and the old façade wall, next to the plaza, is kept.
Ultimately, the project aims at introducing us through a tangential tour to the estate in the time of its maximum splendour (18th century). To that purpose, what was once a street is being carved. Openings to the sky and urban space ensure the spatial and architectural quality of the whole. This carving aligns itself with the vertical space of the main courtyard, which emerges on the cover along with the new attics built. Three characters who look to the Cathedral and the Mediterranean.
In the house of Pópulo, the vacuum squirms and solidifies thanks to space of the mold that makes up the new street inside of the puzzle- houses.
© MGM

Links: MGM architects

Town Library and Reading Park. Torrepacheco_Murcia
The plan projected for the growth of the city destined a general apple of 30,000 m2 to public facilities: a library and a primary school. The program, required for both buildings, allowed us to search for a balanced relationship between the plots assigned to each of them, though the ultimate intention is that both interventions are offered to the city as one space, public, open, and continuous.
The project comes up from the idea of treating the apple as a whole, from a new topography that re-qualifies the expanding area in Torre Pacheco; an urban, cultural and leisure alternative for the citizens. The fold of the ground determines our intervention. The two buildings adapt their relative position to the ground, creating spaces destined for shelter and communication.
The public space contains and protects the buildings—two sides of the same coin.
The intervention is a parenthesis in the city, an area upon which environmentally different circumstances converge. Current buildings cohabit with the growth of longitudinal streets prepared for the construction of semidetached houses in series.

I have always understood that the real value of a project resides in giving what nobody asks for. In this case it lies in completing the built project with a park in the open air, which will profit from the environmental and social conditions (Mediterranean weather, very mild and multiethnic relations) offered by a prosperous city, like this one.
Together with it, we propose new ways to approach and be in the public buildings, and to appropriate urban space.
Compatibility between the buildings and the surrounding terrain, and making the most of spaces and facilities, create a special layout of common areas (library, auditorium, meeting room…), and urbanized spaces (sports courts, greenhouses, gardens, playground, swings…).
Those enlarge the space to be used and enjoyed by the whole city.
The program of uses and of the associated built volumes is rounded off with an art gallery, with independent access, an only space that leans out over the general topography of the plot projected.

On one occasion I was defined as a Pit Bull architect because I do not lose hold of the project till the end. In this case, the trust and complicity of the Town Hall in Torre Pacheco and the Consejería de Educación y Ciencia (Regional Cultural Ministry) in Murcia, together with the fact that we have worked in a team, have made it possible for construction to start with a general definition of the block, and finish with the last building.
© Martín Lejarraga
Links: Martín Lejarraga

Revaluing Homage Tower in Huéscar
A place of military observation which, annulled after the conquest of the city in 1434, became domestic.
The aim is, 600 years later, to restore the vision of its horizon. Climbing till the sight reaches the landscape. To restore here is, mainly, to be able to see.
A viewpoint that evokes medieval fences, a new watchtower.
Like most residential settlements linked to a defensive nucleus, fences are not a matter of choice. They are determined by topographical conditions that favor the building of a network for the visual control of the territory. All this formed a mesh of fugue lines at two levels: on the ground, through the doors, that framed a certain focal point; and on the terraced platforms in the tower system, which provided a panoramic vision of 360º. The destruction of the moor castle in Huéscar and the annulment of its Homage Tower prevent the reading of these visual links, the relationship between the natural and the built surroundings, between the monument (as milestone) and the indefinite extension of its landscape. The project values the place at these two scales: The nearest one, highlighting the milestone in the urban mesh, and the farthest one, raising a platform in the manner of a viewpoint that connects city and territory, domestic space and landscape.
It is our modern sensitivity that values the cultural heritage -material and non-material- that exists here. It gives importance to the Roman headstone field, to walking along the alley on the top of the walls, to the walls themselves that form the tower, to the horizon….From this perspective, the past does not exist. It is built thanks to historiography and through the project. It is always from the contemporary that we intervene.
We are to understand the project as an evocation, rather than as the restitution of an unknown morphology. Always with the utmost respect for the construction as document open to future readings.
Fences here are not a matter of choice. They are determined by topographical conditions that favor the building of a network for the visual control of the territory. But, the destruction of the moor castle in Huéscar and the annulment of its Homage Tower prevent the reading of these visual links, the relationship between the natural and the built surroundings, between the monument (as milestone) and the indefinite extension of its landscape.

The project values the place at these two scales: The nearest one, highlighting the milestone in the urban mesh, and the farthest one, raising a platform in the manner of a viewpoint that restores the connection between city and territory, domestic space and landscape.
The intervention shows how modern sensitivity values the cultural heritage–material and non-material–that exists here. It gives importance to the Roman headstone field, to walking along the alley on the top of the walls, to the walls themselves that form the tower, to the horizon….From this perspective, the past does not exist. It is built thanks to historiography and through the project. It is always from the contemporary that we intervene. For that reason the revaluation of the Homage Tower must be understood as an evocation, rather than as the restitution of an unknown morphology. Always with the utmost respect for the construction as document open to future readings. This evocation, this recovery of the horizon, means highlighting the defensive character of the Tower. To that aim it is necessary to make its specific memories (those that come from the military imaginary) visible. That explains why medieval fences are evoked though a construction in wood that returns the lookout presence, permits ascent through ramps, and creates new visions and spaces, without forgetting that before its defensive component the place already had an identity as landscape, and expressed its own geographical and territorial condition.

© Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas
Links: Antonio Jímenez Torrecíllas