Gallery

Description

The Lanjarón municipality is on the southern flank of Sierra Nevada and it is known for having one of Spain’s most famous spas. The museum project began with the search for a site favoured by the presence of the water in natural conditions. The chosen area is at the entrance to the Sierra Nevada Regional Park, alongside the Lanjarón River and an irrigation ditch that runs around several old buildings that were formerly the municipal abattoir. The museum is installed on this site to safeguard the natural environment from property speculation with the design of a pedestrian itinerary that connects the new activity with the water infrastructure and several examples of traditional architecture, including watermills and an old public laundry.

A shortage of resources led this operation to consist on the reuse and recycling of local materials. The abattoir buildings, have been adapted for the museum, incorporating the irrigation ditch alignment and the river into the new facilities via a simple system consisting of interconnected films of water. A square containing orange trees has been installed in front of the complex, raised slightly above ground level using stacked prefab concrete blocks and eucalyptus tree trunks of different sizes. This area is flooded with water from the ditch at different times to shape a space that changes in appearance as the day passes. The shade and the scent of the orange blossom, the sound of water and the reflections when the square is flooded all create a refreshing atmosphere. The entrance is generated by installing a new wooden construction on the former site of the old abattoir courtyard. This pavilion houses a representative space devoted to water, a reference landmark in the landscape. The building is a reminder of the time when the Capuchina Spring was roofed in the 18th century to form a wooden building that housed Lanjarón’s first official spring. The new pavilion is designed as a space for the senses, suspended in the air, with two openings that invite the visitor to enter and experience the effects of light and darkness. A film of water that spreads across the floor intensifies the experience, a similar sensation to Islamic bath houses.

The minimal work on the former pavilions consisted of demolishing the interior partitions and leaving the wall and roofing structure in view. In the course of the process, it was discovered that the structure originally belonged to a previous set of watermills, giving this recovery work an added archaeological dimension. The exhibition areas have been arranged using the selective occupation of the interior of the former buildings, leaving the corrals and other zones available for future requirements. In order to contrast the stone walls and the brickwork in the old mill, panels extra dosed in white have been inserted to frame the location of the new work. The two main pavilions are used as audiovisual rooms, and a third building is used for the thematic exhibitions of the museum contents. In the oldest pavilion, a glass surface used for projections emerges from the ground flooded with water from the irrigation ditch, generating reflections that dance on the old mill walls.

Biography

Juan Domingo Santos, born in 1961 in the city of Granada, Spain, is an architect and a Projects lecturer at the Granada School of Architecture, and he has been a visiting lecturer at several foreign school of architecture including the Laussane Polytechnic, Switzerland; Lisbon Faculty of Architecture, Portugal; Fach Hochschule Lausitz de Cottbus, Germany; Fakultät Architektur an der Technischen Universität Dresden, Germany ; Faculty of Architecture and Interior Design, San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador ; Columbia University, New York, USA ; School of Art, Architecture and Design de Guadalajara, Mexico) ; AAI, Architectural Association of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland; and currently at the Technische Universität München, Germany.

He has also taught at many Spanish schools including the Navarra, Barcelona and Madrid Schools of Architecture, amongst others. His work has followed a research line concerning landscapes undergoing transformation and architectural operations on heritage buildings. His PhD thesis, “The innovative tradition. On transformations in architecture and art”, was recently awarded a prize by the Caja de Arquitectos Foundation and selected for publication in the Arquitesis collection. He has been appointed Commissioner for several exhibitions including “Chiado. Lisbon. Álvaro Siza, the strategy of memory”, “Music and poetry in southern Al-Ándalus” and recently, “Las fábricas del Sur. On the industrial heritage in Andalusia”. His work has been displayed at exhibitions in Spain and abroad including the 7th Biennale di Architettura di Venice; On Site, New Architecture in Spain organized by the MOMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Spanish Architecture Biennale (1994 and 2011), and he has been nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Prizes (2007), amongst others.

His studio is located in the alcohol distillery of a former sugar factory in Granada, recovered as part of a revitalization project for residential and working uses. He has recently finished “An Encounter”, a short film produced in conjunction with cinema director Juan Bollaín, which describes his experience as a squatter in the factory and his experiments there since 1986, which have influenced his way of understanding the relationship between architecture and heritage, and at the same time, emerged as a rescue mission for this abandoned industrial precinct.