Interventions in the Monastery of Santa Maria de Sijena

The monastery occupied a marshy terrain that caused problems of humidity. Of square typology, a church with three apses, a cloister and naves with a gabled roof and perpiano arches that, in the 14th century, were raised to build another floor. However, the monastery ended up in a chaotic set of buildings until, in the 20th century, the fire reduced it to the most essential, a bare architecture that revealed its construction, guided arches and walls with traces that explained its past. At the beginning of the intervention its condition was uneven, parts had been recovered by Chueca, but the rest was still a ruin

That skeleton was not an archaeological remains because there were recovered areas, and was not possible return to the initial type because it did not know its evolution, nor could it rebuilt the second floor because there was no data. We could recover the own of the monastic type, cloister and naves, but avoiding the false historic and promoting a healthy constructive context with a didactic and expressive sense to enhance its capacity to evoke. Naves E and N have been recovered as exhibition space without technology altering the medieval space. Cloister E gallery was completed as a transition between disconnected sections, and a Baroque chapel was recovered with its zenithal light, the elements that provide its architecture and the original finish of the dome. Old and new are recognizable without drama, and the finishing work does not hide the documentary and expressive charge of the walls. The echo of the medieval and monastic remains without recourse to any previous state. It is not the monastery of another era, it is that has become to our time, as it always was, but the current one attends to the values and resonances of the foundational architecture and those acquired in its evolution

The proposal attends to what happened, the documentary value of the walls and the water pathology, solved with a deep drainage. The naves have been covered with a wooden "alfarje" that suggests the level built in the 14th century, but cutting the architecture where it is unknown. The brick to repair the walls draws the stone gaps, and those of lost tapial with another bastard concrete tapial. Regrowns of the 14th century are expressed with a textured lime mortar. East arcade gallery has been recovered as a volume capable of brick and a sloping roof, joining two old sections without hiding the marks of the wall. Facilities room occupies an exterior brick prism and the ducts run through a chamber under the floor. A lateral bench solves the connections and the diffusion of air, and over it the showcases accompany the sequence of arches as the old separations of the monastic dormitories. They are made of pine wood work handcrafted and to be intoned with the walls so that, together with the ceramic carpet that extends over the vase of facilities, they collaborate to create a space with a serene atmosphere and monastic resonance