'Al-magrib'
A R T S C E N T E R I N A L M A G R O
F I N A L D E G R E E P R O J E C T
Almagro, Ciudad Real, Castilla-La Mancha (Spain)
This small town is known for hosting the International Theatre Festival, the world's largest center of theatrical creation and thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Golden Age. This event takes place every July.
However, rural tourism has been severely affected by Covid-19 since 2020. The services sector has been the most affected.
Is proposed the construction of a higher center of artistic education that brings with it a recovery and a job offer in the service sector. This center will attend to certain factor as its flexibility to adapt to diverse situations and contexts and its ability to stimulate the interest of its potencial users.
Two issues are proposed:
- Rammed Earth, the earth as a building material
- Water as a common good
C H A L L E N G E
The aim is to achieve an architecture that provides a social benefit, increasing the well-being and health of its occupants, an economic benefit, reducing costs and improving productivity, and an environmental benefit, enhancing and protecting ecosystems and biodiversity.
The construction sector consumes in large numbers 33% of national energy consumption. However, building is one of the sectors that has the greatest capacity to reduce energy consumption. As is known, one of the purpose of the European Union for 2050 is to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases by 80% compared to 1990 levels.
However, it is estimated that 33% of the built park for that year is still to be built.
The intention of this project is to achieve an architecture more linked to the identity of the territory and more connected to its context, proposing the following hypothesis:
The residues of today’s architecture will be the materials of the architecture of the future.
In Catalonia and in almost all of Spain the earth walls constitute until the 19th century the usual construction technique, both in rural and urban areas.
Thanks to the presence of very varied lithologies in the surroundings of the city of Almagro and the large number of existing quarries can bet on the use of local materials that have managed to be sustainable over time, do not need to be transformed by industrial processes and eliminate the need for large transfers.
Because the knowledge about the tapial (rammed earth) in the construction has been lost over the years, a new formwork model is proposed that facilitates and lightens the commissioning of both the foundation and the wall.
It is also proposed to develop new mixtures in order to avoid stabilizer such as cement and achieve an architecture with a low cost of return to the environment.
The wall will consist of two elements:
- A poured earth foundation, also known as earth concrete
- And a rammed earth wall
These two elements will be accompanied by an internal structure of wooden sleepers and stakes, as well as a screen of hemp fibers.
By taking advantage of the thermal mass of the building together with other passive strategies such as evaporative cooling, cross ventilation and increased ambient humidity, significant energy savings can be achieved, even to the point of not requiring air conditioning.
In addition, the roof is designed in such a way that:
1. is deployable, so you can take advantage of the orientation of the wall and its high thermal inertia.
2. Generate electricity, since inside the polymeric fabrics are integrated nano generators that take advantage of the oscillatory movement.
These elements will serve as support for the laminated wood structure that will support the interior rooms such as classrooms and workshops.
Another of the elements to be considered has been the water supply.
Almagro is currently supplied by the La Mancha branch pipe, which obtains water from the Tajo-Segura aqueduct, which is currently below 40% of its capacity.
Therefore, taking advantage of the groundwater on the site, a deep injection system is proposed as a strategy for obtaining and recovering water from the aquifers together with a filtering and grey water treatment system, creating a closed cycle that avoids possible hydro-exploitation as happened in the 1980s.
The system is located in the center of the plot in order to serve the different areas and take advantage of the cooling that this treatment will produce in the environment. Each of the aforementioned programmatic areas of the project will have a water distribution, treatment and injection module, so as not to over-treat water if one of these areas is not in use at a certain time.
