Architects: MUDAARQUITECTURA Location: Malpartida de Plasencia, Cáceres, Spain Design Team: Pablo Rey Medrano, Federico Rodriguez Cerro, Mª José Selgas Cáceres, Jorge E. Ramos Jular Technical Architect: Miguel Ángel Tierno de Dios Client: Dirección General de la Policía y la Guardia Civil Area: 2,946.65 sqm Project Year: 2011 Photography: Juan Carlos Quindós
The project is based on a typological review proposing alternatives to the traditional solution of the Civil Guard Barracks House, not only from the compositional point of view but also from its function. They are mostly compact and symmetrical buildings that revolve around a courtyard. This isotropy involves also the overlap of the mixed-use program, housing and Government departments, resulting in obvious problems of function, intimacy and relationship.
From this premise and two constraints, program and space-site, will be generated and structured the project.
Taking on account the space-site, its trapezoidal geometry and its location on the edge of a morphologically heterogeneous area of a small town in Extremadura (Spain), we propose, in a natural manner, the separation between the different parts of the program, that include housing and Government departments within a required enclosure.
On the one hand housing are placed in the more regular area of the site, which will allow the seriation on the same type of detached house and single apartment. This series are organized in two rows with a facade to each of the two inner streets created. Alternating full and empty volumes in the composition of the seriation, enables most of the inhabitable pieces to face south, creating also a dynamic rhythm in front.
On the other hand, if the typological characteristics of the housing are uniformity, repetition and seriation, the building of official departments is the distortion of the ensemble. A required distortion due to the building location in the bow of the trapezoidal site, so that its geometry is determine by the boundaries of the site, and a necessary distortion because this position and the nature of the program require a greater degree of presence and representation. This building is organized into three levels, a level in basement accompanying the natural slope of the land, and has two floors above gradient that will twist one over the other to reach the boardroom window on the first floor that seeks to look at the Extremadura countryside, the Dehesa.
