MTM arquitectos - Xpiral arquitectura

ITINERARY

Javier Fresneda and Javier Sanjuán won in 2001 Europan 6, “In-between cities”, teamed with Javier Peña, on the Baracaldo site (E).
Javier Fresneda and Javier Sanjuán, architects from ETSA Madrid, founded in 1993 MTM arquitectos, working as associates since 1997.
Javier Peña, architect from ETSA Madrid, founded Xpiral Arquitectura in 1997.
Some projects are developed in common by MTM arquitectos and Xpiral arquitectura.
The team works a lot on the idea of the urban landscape, proposing architectural forms consonant with the scale of the landscape. Their design has strong sculptural quality, which gives a plastic quality to the urban plan. They give new landscape to the inhabitants.
J. Fresneda is projects lecturer at EUA Alcalá Henares since 2003. J. Sanjuan is project lecturer at ESAYA since 2005. J. Peña is professor at the School of Architecture in Alicante since 2001.

DENSITY / INTENSITY

Concentrating and adding multiple uses. Multiplying possibilities and activities. Liberating the space to create more public soil. Constructing the public space already from the private space.

Alcalá de Henares (E) - Sport centre

The site occupies a dominant position, above the motorway, which runs through a trench, like a valley. Integrated with the natural environment, this landscape is enhanced by the project, which proposes to widen and reproduce the relief by means of a roof that perfectly espouses the different dimensional requirements of the sports areas. A multiplicity of tracks connect the natural and the artificial. A flow of players and spectators. A sports area boundaried as a leisure park. This brings into being new spaces, which promote the emergence of multiple relations, great social intensity, which dilutes the density of the sports programme contained in this project.

GEOGRAPHICAL LANDMARK

To recognize the specificity of local culture and to update it, architecture, understood as landscape that attends to the natural and artificial, turns then into a new urban and geographical highlight, a specific and characterized space.

Murcia (E) - DNA

With its location in the Ricote Valley, Abarán's geographical characteristics offer a high level of environmental quality. Drawing on the principle of sustainability, the project consists of a series of operations to highlight the existing legacy, and maintain its identity, whilst adapting it to the new context. The project operates on the Rambla at different levels in order to promote a new urban dynamism, a renewal of cultural heritage, infrastructure building and tourism.

INTERLACED VALUES

Diluting the limits building intermediate places: public/private, natural/artificial, fulfilled/voids, real/virtual. Continuous transits drawn across the own building: platforms – pedestrian roofs – little hills. Transversality

Valencia (E) – Architecture for a firm

For an experienced firm, the construction of new buildings is always an opportunity to rethink working methods, objectives and image.
During several months, the operation of the company has been analysed, real immersion in the world of the automobile.
It then became clear that the identity of the building was based on "invisible sportiness": a mixture of flexibility, responsibility and austere elegance. In two words: vanity and vivacity.

TIME’S EFFECTS

The " erroneous processes " derived from the climatology and from the passage of time like positive values to promoting: the puddles, when water accumulated to reflect the sky, the “vegetation deferred " like mosses, that speak about the passage of time, mutant natural textures… irregularities in the process.

Madrid (E) - Full and empty spaces

The modelling of the area allows at the same time to invert the concept of underground and to offer to the depressed building a new and surprising captured landscape, "the secret botanist". In such landscape grow the metallic trunks that support the volume of the classrooms above, whose presence to the north, vanishes when fusing with the environment, and at the same time is activated when its closing reflects the transition of time, the constant transformation of nature, the movement of the pedestrians and of the vehicles… The implantation of the building produces a liberation of the totality of the plot. The whole exterior space is public.

Europan Generation, The reinterpreted city Catalogue
Editions: Cité de l’architecture and Europan, May 2007
224 colour pages, bilingual English/French


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