House and Chapel in Valleacerón

Description

The project, with its four main pieces, the house, chapel, hunting pavilion and the property manager’s house, stands in the summit and north slope of a small hill that rises above several limits of the landscape: the place, the valley and the jagged, broken and diffuse horizon.The pieces try to manifest the land itself, establishing new relationships, new episodes pertaining to movements and views: through what is hidden or emphasized. This way, aside from this close correlation between landscape, objects, movement and views, each object is shown with different importance, from the most symbolic to the most quiet or secluded. The link binding everything together is the concept of the fold: the fold as a hidden source of the different objects and spaces.The chapel develops around the study and manipulation of the “box-fold”, strained focally. It stands at the top of a soft hill, a point of reference in the landscape envisioned from the access to the estate, showing several different views in the approach. The chapel is placed, with a slight displacement, following the west-east axis. The entrance is in the west facade, accessed from below, up towards a focal point, in non-symmetric frontality. In this approach, the variable scale of the fold is responsible for presenting a volume that is compact at times, but breaks occasionally, offering a series of spaces - closed-compact, open-fragmented - in constant change. The chapel is conceived as naked, without artificial lighting, as a place in which the indoors-outdoors spatial relation establishes its sense: only a cross and an effigy in the focal point reinforce the symbolic aspects of the project. When considering a fold in a box - the corbusian “boîte” - a single material comes to mind: golden concrete, capable of seizing all of the hints that are required of this volume: from capturing the direct light, that bursts in as another plane in the composition of space, to transmitting the unstable and colorful aroma of dawn. Light is therefore used as a second material in the chapel: a material, in contrast with concrete, that is fragile, changing, mobile and unstable, one that rules or disappears.(Description provided by the architects)