San Miguel Tower refurbishment
La arquitectura que se propone no pretende alterar el paisaje existente, sino completarlo. Una intervención que lejos de entenderse como un edificio se acerca a las construcciones defensivas o a sutiles inscripciones en el territorio. Objetos encontrados que parecen que siempre han estado ahí, en el paisaje.
The fragment of the bay of Almería bounded between the town of San Miguel de Cabo de Gata and the Lighthouse is connected by the ALP-822 road. In a southeast direction one has the sea on the right and the salt flats on the left. The Torre de San Miguel on the right and the Iglesia de la Almadraba de Monteleva on the left. Two landmarks in this arid, almost desert landscape.
The Church, recently restored, is at the foot of the road, on a podium that looks out to the sea. La Torre is located halfway between the road and the sea. The Church belongs to the road, it stands white and slender. The Tower lives in the sand, close to the waves. It is made of the same landscape, it does not stand out chromatically. It is a truncated cone of low height, of great abstraction. His figure stands out strongly and with great presence in this vast territory. In the eighties a wall with turrets in the four corners was added that it is proposed to demolish to recover that powerful figure already pointed.
The "landart" uses the landscape as material. They are erodible works, transformable by the climate and melted by nature. The architecture proposed here is limited to the Tower. Create a new, open, circular enclosure around pre-existence. It is drawn on the ground with the simplest geometry, the one that has a center, displaced in this case. A circular slit that comes into tension with the tower's own conical figure. An incision that is planted at the existing elevation on the elevation from the road, leaving the isolated profile of the Tower and that slowly offers a 6% descent towards the entrance of the new construction. Soon one is sheltered from the wind of Cabo de Gata. Depressed with respect to the height of the Tower and between concrete walls, the spaces required in the bases of the contest follow one another. Almost unintentionally, this zigzagging promenade is crossed and it resurfaces at the other end of the built arch, close again to the staircase of the Tower. We have closed this new contour and the Tower has always been there, surrounded and included.
