Gálvez & Wieczorek & Brunelli architects

ITINERARY

Mª Auxiliadora Gálvez Pérez was a winner of the 2001 EUROPAN 6 competition “In-between cities” on the Cordova site in Spain and of the 2004 Europan 7 competition “suburban challenge” on the La Unión site, also in Spain.
An architect specialising in construction and a graduate of the E.T.S.A.M (Madrid Higher Technical School of Architecture), she went freelance in 2000 and has won several national and international competitions: joint winner of the Ciudad Levante international competition of ideas and first prize in the Celebration of Cities competition.
Working both alone and with Izabela Wieczorek and Luca Brunelli, she has used Europan as the basis for the development of an original phenomenological attitude, creating spatial sensations from natural features. Sunlight, water, earth are sensitive materials with which she built her architecture. The city becomes a fusion between nature and building, creating an “urban forest” where citydwellers can move around following the rhythms of the body and the dynamics of motion.
Mª Auxiliadora was selected for the eighth Venice Architecture Biennial. She has sat on numerous juries, including recently the jury for the eighth Europan session. On behalf of Panama, she is currently organising the Programme of International Cooperation with Latin America and the Maghreb, set up by the Government of Andalusia’s Department of Architecture and Housing. Since 1997, she has taught at the C.E.U. Architecture and E.P.S. San Pablo C.E.U, where she is currently responsible for Projects V and VI. She is preparing her doctorate at E.T.S.A.M.’s Architectural Projects Department.

SENSORY SPACES

When architecture becomes an instrument of knowledge and arouses emotions, feelings, it is able to link the new spaces created by means of time and place with collective ideas and cultural roots, with memory. Architecture then becomes both unexpected and changing, but also understood, because it is identified with the desires of the people who inhabit it.

Valdemoro, Madrid (E) – Ground and roof

The building’s architecture is based on the observation of children in their day-to-day activities.
The building faces the courtyard, with a southern exposure, and its transparency allows a view into the children's world. The courtyard frontage is interspersed with openings of several types; it is highly translucent, with a wall composed of light-filtering cellular polycarbonate sheets.
The use of colour to distinguish the different floor areas helps children to feel at home.

BUILDING AS LANDSCAPE

Imagining a building as a landscape means trying to define the specific character of that which is established at a given place. If we attempt to identify the landscape's own rules and apply them to the architecture, this one then ceases to be a source of distortion or a problem for nature, but instead becomes a part of it.

Valdemoro, Madrid (E) - School in a park

The chosen plot for the new nursery school is the corniche of Enrique Tierno Galván Park, near the access to the expressway to Andalusia. Like this corniche, the building is visually detached whilst providing exceptional views. Built at the top of the slope, overlooking the park, the building is imagined as a landscape. So from the access road, in its upper part, all that is visible is the landscaped roof, which looks like a continuation of the natural landscape.

PULSATION - PERMEABILITY

Moving through contrary spaces and perceiving their rhythm links the human body and its motion with the environment. Urban space is considered to be the place where spatial dilations and compressions patten our vision of the world and our desires. The city, which in certain places seems permeable and visible can, as we move through it, prove containing and secret.

La Union, Murcia (E) - Residential growth

The aim of this project is to encourage a form of residential growth in which housing is devised in terms of personal desires.
A list of desires is established and each spatial desire linked with the concepts of garden, entrance, living-room, sea, rainbow, silence, altitude is associated with a bioclimatic technique which will offer both sensory and physical comfort.
The same operation is carried out on an urban scale to create a somewhat labyrinthine public space interspersed with intimate places of desire.

SENSIBLE MATERIALS

The qualities of building materials can transform architecture into a sensory resonance box. Reflections, shadows, light, textures, echoes, sunrise... everything can be used as if they were tangible materials.

Valdemoro, Madrid (E) - Reflections on the ice

The skating rink adjusts to the boundaries of the plot and tries to reduce the impression of cramped space between the area's different structures.
The materials used take in account the green spaces surrounding: the coloured curtain wall makes the inside of the skating rink part of the park space and the green colour used for the whole building suggests the surrounding trees. The interior seeks to take advantage of the atmosphere created by the ice and becomes a box of sensory resonance: reflections, transparency, light, etc.

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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