REHABILITATION IN SAN VICENTE DE ELVIÑA
A Coruña
The project is proposed as a medium scale intervention in the immediate environment surrounding the city of A Coruña, a real situation due to the economic crisis that our society is going through and the continuous abandonment of populations of these characteristics that our country is experiencing. The consolidation of San Vicente de Elviña is sought through a series of interventions, which will contribute to reduce the impact of the large infrastructures that have been surrounding the nucleus, in addition to establishing a greater relationship with the university complex with which it borders.
This work proposes a set of residential units for research professors and their families, along with work spaces and social gathering places for the community of the nucleus. The program seeks the relationship and dialogue of these researchers with the inhabitants of San Vicente de Elviña. It is a question of revitalizing a place in process of abandonment through current initiatives in a territory with a lot of value as it is the Galician.
The project is understood as a route that starts from the great existing interest in the character of each of the spaces that run along the axis that descends from the top of San Vicente de Elviña. A descent that allows us to know a whole repertoire of elements of the popular architecture made by the inhabitants of the place, as well as a succession of collective settlements around this route, popularly known as "rueiros". These spaces are formed thanks to the use, for fieldwork, of the spaces near the houses, all of them linked to the road. A stone to sit at the entrance of the house and talk with the neighbors, a tree that shelters us and gives us shade, a deck to leave the house without getting wet ... All these interventions made by people, with granite as the main material, are full of emotion, intensity and a great common sense.
Architecture must intervene in those elements that are not in good condition in order to improve them in favor of the whole. Because of this, there is a point in this descending route, in which, due to the deterioration of the existing buildings and the interventions that have been carried out subsequently, this beautiful concatenation of streets and communal spaces, typical of the place, is lost and blurred. The action will try to recover and dignify the old and original buildings in poor condition, thus allowing to re-establish a relationship on both sides of the descending axis and with the rest of the rural core. The intervention will try to reduce the intervention to a single element, which will try to colonize the place and embrace the old architecture respecting it and giving it value. Concrete is this new element, the new stone of today, which will give unity and create a whole with the same language.
Each construction made along this path, will become one more stone of all those that make up this set called San Vicente de Elviña. A set that people will inhabit and enjoy, and that will be materialized through volumes that will be expressed as rocks driven into the ground. Volumes in which there will be only space, nothing more, only space; massive volumes that will age with the architecture that surrounds them; volumes that will be eroded by the water running down their walls and that will intertwine with the vegetation, which will flood this small rueiro establishing that transition from the exterior space to the nucleus, through paths and a water stream that is recovered, until ending in a completely rural space.
Inside the rehabilitated volumes, concrete cores will organize the whole space. These structures will have a very direct relationship with the volumes that are driven and create the public space outside. These exterior spaces, which are part of this monolithic route of access to the site, are made with a rougher and rougher concrete. This brutalist sensation of archaic architecture will be accentuated through the geometry and thicknesses of these monolithic pieces that float above our heads.
The concrete and its massiveness as a new stone, the life created by the water in its path, and a changing garden that introduces you, are the concepts that will flood and consolidate San Vicente de Elviña.