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Architects: longo+roldán arquitectos
- Area: 484 m²
- Year: 2012
Text description provided by the architects. CAEaCLAVELES is a residential and hotel project developed by the studio longo+roldan architects together with artist Emma Fernandez Granada. Winner of Asturias Award for Architecture 2012, the project arises from the search to preserve the permanence of landscape features on which to act through a symbiotic architecture with the environment and linked to the characteristic features of the area.
The small and unique building stands on a plot of 8000 square meters, located in La Pereda, in Llanes, Asturias. It is a privileged natural environment composed of the protected landscape of the East Coast of the Sierra del Cuera, parallel to the sea, with predominantly karst nature with numerous and mild slopes.
To reduce the impact on the environment, the building is adapted to the particular topography recreating a hill similar to the existing ones, conceived as an organic volume whose interior space is projected in relation to the surrounding vegetation and open to the forests around. Thus, the landscape flows through the exterior glass envelope of this volume.
The structure is a single volume containing both uses and is primarily defined by a concrete slab, curved in the shape of a helix, which supports the roof garden that defines this project of landscape integration. Intended to be used as a planting area, the roof garden acts as a natural extension of the ground, that is, regaining that ground surface. A load bearing wall, also curved with vertical aluminum profiles, separates the housing-hotel spaces.
The intended purpose of the project is to provide travelers with a tourism alternative that seeks to promote understanding the natural environment and its conservation, based on sustainable tourism development centered on the respect and enjoyment of environmental areas. The difference in this case lies on our effort to surpass the dominant concepts in these kinds of projects that deplete the relationship between rural tourism – popular architecture – tradition, to move on to develop a model that associates the necessary new relationships between rural tourism – contemporary architecture – environmental culture.
The result is an architectural proposal that is completely organic in its shapes and in its envelope. A synthesis between delicacy and geometric strength, in which architecture and landscape are mixed due to the contrast between the weightlessness of the concrete slab that supports the roof and the lightness of the glass enclosures.
