Description

Ojuela: the dream of a community.

In the bowels and legacy of a mining settlement, the ghost town of a previous society, we dream of progress: a new life. The scars and settlement of a previous time contain our vision, with all its complexity and possibilities. The built physical components, in trance and devoid of meaning, are the basis of a new possibility of inhabiting, serving and coexisting in society.

A settlement, a form of ideal society intertwined with a container that has completed a previous cycle. With great sensitivity and subtlety, we interpret the different layers of the site and unravel the pre-existence, the present demands and the imminent future growth.

We propose a town built from what has been built and is rooted in history, time and place. An architecture that breeds and fuses geometry with the topography. A population as rooted in the earth as it is ambitious to aim for the sky and reach the horizon. A society that subsists on the resources they generate and resolves its persistence in profound harmony with the environment.

The compositional language, in terms of space and architecture, seeks to fuse pure geometries and slender prisms with the site’s current natural and built forms. While some elements are immersed and rooted in the ground, some others grow radically vertical towards the heights. The core of the master plan happens right between and above the historic masonry ruins with a building envisioned in concrete and the conception of an ambitious structure that allows the new to occur without harming the old in any way.

The planning strategy and design arise to decipher what’s ingrained on the site’s many layers and try to figure them out along a new urban form.

Finalist Project in Félix Candela Award IV Edition.