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Published on Leave a comment on Spanish Architecture: Headquarters Caja de Badajoz by Studio Lamela

Badajoz is a medium-sized Spanish city located in the southern Extremadura autonomous community, next to the Portuguese border. Although Merida is the capital of the community and its touristic reference, Badajoz is the largest, most populated and probably the most relevant city of the region, both in terms of economic health and general basic services. This is mostly due to its historical existence near the border, commercial traditions (the Portuguese used to come here to buy caramels) and geophysical characteristics, such as the Gévora River (the city lies at the point where it connects with the larger Guadiana River).

The Caja Badajoz is an important bank for this proud community. It’s the main savings bank in town and it’s the most relevant economic representation of the inhabitants, who are quite conservative. The main goal of this project was to give a powerful physical expression to that immaterial importance by building the new headquarters of the bank on a plot located in the banks of the aforementioned river, next to the Puente Real Bridge. After a restricted tender back in 2007, the chosen team was the Madrid-based Studio Lamela Architects.

Caja Badajoz - Spanish Architecture: Headquarters Caja de Badajoz by Studio Lamela
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Published on Leave a comment on Social Housing Units in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Basque Country

In Vitoria-Gasteiz, a town in northern Spain, a housing block has created 242 apartments for the socially disadvantaged.

The U-shaped structure is capped on one end with a 21-storey tower. The remaining three sides rise between four and seven stories, creating a gently sloping roof. Since this roof is visible from the tower it was treated as a ‘fifth façade,’ the architects say, meaning it was coated in the same red hue as the exterior-facing walls.

The tower maximizes sunlight onto windows and patios. Inside, bedrooms have been positioned to overlook the central garden, while kitchens face outwards toward surrounding streets.

‘The public area of the house is linked with its urban equivalent,’ says architect Iñaki Garai Zabala of ACXT. ‘The more private one destined for rest is linked with the inner courtyard as a space of peace and quiet.’

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Published on Leave a comment on Spanish Architecture: Casa V in La Coruña, by Dosis de Arquitectura

Casa V consists on the rehabilitation, adaptation and expansion of an existing house, located in Oleiros (La Coruña), designed and built in the early 1960’s.

The intention of the project is to make a place where three generations of one same family can enjoy their holiday simultaneously. For that purpose, a new house is made for the two younger generations, which consists on a side wing that articulates itself with the old building on the northeast. The rooftop of this new house serves as a private garden for the pre-existing house as a landscape response to the existing topography. The original house accommodates now the spaces for family and social interaction, as well as the rooms of the first generation. Each family member has its own independence while remaining a part of a single set. A multilayered wall defined by a single construction detail, which serves both as structure and as thermal and environmental overcoat, meanders in order to embrace the multiplicity of events that occur in the house. Spaces are defined by the unfolding of matter in space-time, which topologically adapts itself to what happens inside. The new house is formalized by the continuous flow of a completely neutral wrap – no edges, no color, no texture - and, within this wrapping, life, action, is the protagonist.

casav - Spanish Architecture: Casa V in La Coruña, by Dosis de Arquitectura

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Published on Leave a comment on Contemporary Architecture in Spain: Tiny Apartment in Madrid by MYCC

This singular urban shelter, located in Madrid, is just twenty square metres and nevertheless is one hundred cubic metres of volume. In such an enclosed space should a single person live and work. He will use his creativity and dynamism to make it his own sweet home.

This Madrid apartment, even with its small size, wants to offer generous spaces and a big quantity of different pieces of use. The pieces that make it up, does not really have a fixed clearly defined use: the kitchen is a walk-through room to get the living. There are stands rather than stairs to go down the living, which is over a cellar-storage room. Then, it is possible to get the ladder to go up to the indoor sunny terrace, a place to be used as a study or a chill out. Also the central living room connects through four steps to the bathroom. This is an oversized kind of luxury room that holds even an in-situ cosy kind of hamman bath.

Construction and finishing are made in a direct and unadorned way and all is full of bright white.

tiny apartment in madrid - Contemporary Architecture in Spain: Tiny Apartment in Madrid by MYCC
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Published on Leave a comment on Super Luxury Villa in Mallorca, Balearic Islands

Known as Villa Colani, inspired by the legendary designer Luigi Colani and located on the island of Majorca (Balearics, Spain), this estate was finished in 2009. There's about 10,700-square-feet of living space that includes a spherical kitchen for which the appliances (even the spherical ones) were designed by Sheer and flown in from Italy. More than 1,230 square feet of 24-carat gold (the gold weighed 60 pounds and at the time cost more than $1 million) was used in the swimming pools and house. There are golden fixtures and crystal chandeliers. Specialists and security experts from Austria, Germany and Switzerland were brought in for the installations. And, of course, there is a safe room.

Everything in the house runs by remote control -- appliances, curtains, the closed circuit TV, and security systems.

It's a home full of gadgets, glitter and gizmos. But of the highest quality and expense. The estate is a series of circular structures, connected by terraces, water features and wrapped in a package where the exterior is bright orange. There's an eclectic mix of statues, blue marble columns with gilded plinths, genuine gold mosaic in the bath, and a pool that abuts directly to the exterior of the house.

The exacting renovation of the villa was followed closely by the media in Majorca and Germany. And the crowning media moment came when Colani himself visited to witness the installation of the Colani entrance door. He apparently was pleased.

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Published on Leave a comment on World Interior of the Year, Carrer Avinyó, Barcelona

Apartment in Barrio Gotico, Barcelona

Carrer Avinyó is a piano nobile apartment in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona (Catalonia). The apartment is situated on the corner of a significant local crossroads. Like the Flatiron Building in New York, where Broadway cuts diagonally across the city grid, the apartment building has a distinctive triangular form that is echoed in the adjacent public space, Plaça George Orwell. A primary design move in the apartment’s refurbishment was to take advantage of this special situation by removing all of the interior cross walls to create one large corner room.

The apartment will be the holiday home of two brothers who grew up in Barcelona (Catalonia). The new mosaic floor of the apartment is decorated with a triangular pattern that matches the geometry of the plan. The tile pattern is graded in colour from green at one end of the apartment to red at the other to differentiate the brothers' private spaces. The encaustic tiles were manufactured by Mosaics Martí, suppliers of tiles to Antoni Gaudí.

Bedrooms were created inside large pieces of furniture that have the appearance of small buildings – the city beyond the apartment walls is mirrored by a diminutive city within. The high-level library becomes balconies that connect each bedroom to their en-suite bathrooms. A large, specially-designed dining table stands at the street corner where the red and green tiles mix as an invitation for gatherings of friends and family.

Carrer Avinyó is shortlisted for a World Architecture Festival 2013 Inside Award and UK Interior Architect of the Year 2013.

Carrer Avinyó - World Interior of the Year, Carrer Avinyó, Barcelona
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Published on 1 Comment on Contemporary Architecture in Spain: Bilbao Airport, Basque Country

On 19th November 2000 during the inauguration of La Paloma, the Bilbao International Airport, architect Santiago CALATRAVA announced that the new terminal was “a message of love to Baskland”.

White and very expressive, Bilbao International Airport is a gigantic three storey block of steel and glass with a sharp silhouette expressing the idea of flight and the leap that the metropolitan area had begun to take.

The steel and concrete structure , nicknamed La Paloma (the Dove) because of its resemblance to a giant bird about to take flight, is integrated into the hilly green landscape in the Txoriherri Valley in close proximity to Bilbao. The aluminium skin of the Central Terminal sweeps across the 140 meter long terminal entry, providing cover for multiple levels of arrival and departure.

The layout was designed to limit the impact of auxiliary buildings on the vista of the main building. An elegant four-story parking structure, with a skylit walkway leading to the Terminal Building, is tucked into a grassy embankment.

Bilbao Airport - Contemporary Architecture in Spain: Bilbao Airport, Basque Country
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Published on 1 Comment on Architecture in Spain: Hotel Arts in Barcelona

Designed by the distinguished architect Bruce Graham of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the Hotel Arts is part of Barcelona’s recent cultural renaissance, and as modern as the city itself.

Built to coincide with the Olympic Games in 1992, this luxury hotel is a landmark on the Barceloneta boardwalk: 44 stories of blue glass and exposed steel soaring high above the seafront. Inside, hard edges and materials give way to an environment of elegance and refinement, filled with luxurious spaces to explore and discover at your leisure.

The seafront hotel overlooks the Mediterranean on the Port Olimpic, next to the marina and Barcelona’s famous beaches, and surrounded by lush terraces and lively promenades. Close by, the district of Barceloneta is a hive of characterful bars, cafes and local seafood restaurants.

The hotel’s terraced gardens bask in the dappled shade of Frank Gehry’s monumental golden fish sculpture, one of Barcelona’s most iconic works of contemporary public art.

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Published on Leave a comment on Architecture in Spain: an Office Building in Navarra

When the local highways department wanted a new headquarters building located in Navarra, Spain, they commissioned architects Vaillo + Irigaray who brought wit to a simple office building. They created a sunscreen made from rusty steel sections and gabion walls filled with shredded tyres.

The plan is simply organized in a linear fashion to take advantage of views to the south. Support spaces are arranged along the northern side of the building, whilst parking is beneath at ground floor level where it is shady.

The south façade has a ripple in its appearance that introduces a sense of movement. Its form was generated from particular shifts in the site topography. Without this, the façade might seem monotonous.

The short end walls have the wonderful gabion cladding filled with shredded tyres, a nod of course to the function of the highways department itself, but bringing a beautiful texture and an interesting play of light to the building.

office building in Navarra - Architecture in Spain: an Office Building in Navarra
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Published on Leave a comment on Architecture in Spain: Cliffside House in Calpe, Alicante

Nature and architecture converge in breathtaking fashion at this cliffside residence in Calpe (Alicante), Spain. Designed by the Valencia-based firm Fran Silvestre Arquitectos, the stucco-clad home features living spaces projected above the steep terrain, with a crisp exterior staircase linking them to the minimalist pool terrace below. If architecture is experienced as a series of moments, what could be more invigorating than the instant of emerging from a dip in this extraordinary setting?

casa del acantilado1 - Architecture in Spain: Cliffside House in Calpe, Alicante

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