Cabildo Training Center
Architects
Sol89. María González and Juanjo López de la Cruz
Collaborators
George Smudge, architecture student; Insur JG, installations; Alejandro Cabanas, structure
Technical Architect
Víctor Baztán
Client
Cabildo de la Catedral de Sevilla
Construction Company
Carrión Fernández S.L.
Fotografía
Fernando Alda
We could observe the suburban apple blocks that give rise to the neighbourhood where the Training Center is located as if they were a single constructive act. We would then discover a maze of unexpected and surprising spaces that have been added in a random manner over time. Recesses that blur the boundary between private and public, concatenated courtyards that hollow out the block, intermediate plants, spontaneous gardens, ambiguous places between outside and inside, zigzagging paths, urban events condensed into the built mass that have emerged from unplanned accumulation. In our case, the existing slope and the necessity to adapt to the block’s morphology allow us to explore this resource where the notion of a plan is blurred by a continuous route that links the different theoretical spaces, associated with the façade, with workshops nestled around the interior void. It’s as if we traced the possible section hidden in the photograph of Clarence Schmidt’s House of Mirrors in Woodstock or the route Monsieur Hulot describes while strolling through his house in Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle. Broken sections appear, where each space is where it should be beyond structural efficiencies or normative limits. The Training Center proposes a maze of spaces that look at each other, connected by a continuous route, diagonal views, places that surround others, blurring the relationship between inside and outside, situations of density that, like in an unplanned fabric, accumulate spatial events and mix uses.
