Educational and Research Centre at El Fonduco

This isn't a project focused on researching spaces or on thinking about aesthetics, or whatever else seen from an attributive perspective. This project thinks about inhabiting, dwelling, living in a place. It's about the angst, that feeling caused by the loss of identity. The answer is the sincere projection of oneself in the architectural proposal.

First of all, El Fonduco will be a bulwark: they won’t pass. The traffic will be removed and the habitable space will reconquer the shore. The hatchery will absorb the muted cul-de-sac, and will reconvert it in a significant final point of the coastal promenade. Secondly, the cove will be reconnected from above. The old stairs and paths, which already existed but had fallen in disuse over the years, will be restored. Thirdly, both, Vivers d’en Maspoch and Hotel Rocamar, will become new intensity nodes, to reestablish the pulse and memory of El Fonduco. The program used to boost this last strategy, will be focused on returning the essence to the cove, and the scales to the harbour. A Marine Research Centre will restore the larger scale. An Aquaculture School, with middle and higher degrees of studies, will recover the national scale. The practical classes and laboratories will be placed in the hatchery, becoming a reminiscence of the shellfish crafts. Hotel Rocamar will host the theory classes and administrative programme. All of this will be accompanied with a small residence hall in the upper floors of the old hotel, to accommodate people who come from outside to study in El Fonduco. The public space will recover the aesthetics of its shore. The new topography will focus its interest in the vertical drop dock – sea; a soft and warped blanket will mediate this relation. In the horizontal dimension, the entrances of the restored buildings will recover the cliff – shore connection, which had been lost. In both buildings, the main point will be focused on its more problematic strip: the embedding of the building in the cliff. As the architect J. Bonet did in a house of this cove, the void will resolve that conflictive meeting, placing there all the communications and new requirements of the buildings. When the intervention touches the facade, because degraded parts had been to be demolished, the skin of the building will be a ceramic net, as marine nets work: raised from the ground to avoid tangling up. The intervention will appear as a backdrop which wants nothing more than enhancing the essence and preexisting aesthetics.