Constructed in the nineteenth century, the building previously featured a series of outdoor paddocks and a large courtyard, used for storing livestock before the slaughtering process. As part of the renovation, Sol89 has extended the building into these spaces to create kitchens and classrooms.

Like most of the town's architecture, white-painted walls surrounded the perimeter of the slaughterhouse site and now enclose both the new and old sections of the building.

The original pitched roof is clad with traditional clay tiles, but the architects used modern flat ceramics to give a vibrant red to the asymmetric gables that make up the roof of the extension.

"If we observe Medina-Sidonia from a distance, it seems to be a unique ceramic creation moulded by the topography of Medina," explain architects María González and Juanjo López de la Cruz. "The Professional Cooking School uses this idea of the moulded ceramic plane to draw its geometry. This roof lends unity to the built complex and interprets the traditional construction of the place."

The original arched doorway remains as the entrance to the school and leads in via the old structure. Inside, the architects have replaced the original flooring with exposed concrete that skirts around a set of historic columns in the main hall.

The kitchens are lined with tiles on the floors and walls. High level windows help to bring light in from above, while small glass courtyards are positioned at intervals to provide areas for students to grow vegetables and herbs.

A few slaughterhouses in Spain have been converted to new uses in recent years. Others we've featured include an office and event space in Madrid and a cinema in the same city.

See more architecture projects in Spain, including the restoration of a coastal landscape in Cadaqués.

Photography is by Fernando Alda - see more pictures of this project on his website.

Here's some more information from Sol89

Medina is a historic town in the hills in Cadiz. Its houses are known for their whitewashed walls and their ceramic roofs. The project involves adapting an ancient slaughterhouse, built in the XIX century, into a Professional Cooking School.

The ancient slaughterhouse was composed of a small construction around a courtyard and a high white wall that limits the plot. If you are going to act in the historic city you must adapting, taking shelter, settling in its empty spaces. The density of the architecture of the ancient slaughterhouse, where brick walls, stones and Phoenician columns coexist, contrasts with the empty space inside the plot, limited by the wall. The project proposes catching this space through a new ceramic roof that limits the new construction and consolidates the original building.

If we observe Medina Sidonia from a distance, it seems to be a unique ceramic creation molded by the topography of Medina. The Professional Cooking School uses this idea of the molded ceramic plane to draw its geometry. This roof lends unity to the built complex and interprets the traditional construction of the place, ceramic roofs and whitewashed walls. Some little courtyards are inserted, working as ventilation shaft, and are cultivated with different culinary plants which are used by the students to cook.

At the original building, ancient floors were replaced by slabs of concrete with wooden formwork that recognise traditional building forms, walls are covered with white and rough lime mortar which seeks material memory of its industrial past, and the existing Phoenician columns, displaced from the disappeared Temple of Hercules, have been consolidated. All of those materials, even the time, built this place.

Architects: María González y Juanjo López de la Cruz. Sol89
Team: George Smudge (architecture student), Jerónimo Arrebola (quantity surveyor), Alejandro Cabanas (structure), Insur JG (building services), Novoarididian SA y Rhodas SL (contractors)

Client: Fundación Forja XXI
Location: C/ Rubiales S/N, Medina Sidonia, Cádiz, Spain
Area: 751 sqm
Completion date: 2011

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Ancient Slaughterhouse by Sol89 appeared first on Dezeen.

Patchy timber shields the glazed upper storeys of this extension to a historic town hall in southern Spain by architects Viar Estudio.

The extension creates a new entrance courtyard at the side of the original 16th Century town hall, a former prison decorated in the Plateresque style in the centre of the World Heritage town of Baeza.

Above the glazed doors to the extension, an extended first floor cantilevers outwards to shelter arriving visitors.

This first floor also bridges across from the rear of the building to connect with a second block just behind.

This new four-storey building has the same timber shades across its extruded windows and features a wooden staircase that ascends in front of a shimmering golden wall.

The interior walls of the original town hall remain exposed and intact, so the junctions between new and old are highlighted.

See more recent projects from Spain here, including an outdoor swimming pool and a concrete sculpture museum.

Photography is by Fernando Alda and you can see more pictures of this project on his website.

Here's some more information from Viar Estudio:

The Baeza Township Project has been read as a unit in a duration, as a constant change process where the new design has been thought as an additional stratum, as the last sediment layer in time the building has created. The thought about the temporal process of architecture is fundamental.

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Historical architecture is based on overlays, accumulating many different pasts in what could be called the «durée» of architecture. Henri Bergson said that the ultimate reality is not the being, nor the changing being, but the continuous process of change which he called «durée» or duration.

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Architecture has a way of being in time, a becoming that lasts, a change that is substance on its own. The rhythm of the duration and of the successive changes connotes a dissolution process, subtraction, addition, mutation or a change of uses that befalls all architectural ensembles through time.

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The Baeza Township Project is entwined within the concept of architectural «durée». It is designed thinking about the additive condition of the site, in the quality of change as the substance of the project and as a part of the character of the building in time.

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Spanish architects MedioMundo have completed a bright red multimedia centre amongst a collection of towering apartment blocks in Seville.

The Cibercentro Macarena has a red-lacquered steel exterior, with shutters that fold away from windows like the gills of a fish.

Like its neighbours, the building is raised up on a series of pilotis, creating a sheltered Wi-Fi terrace underneath.

A glazed entrance lobby and two multi-purpose rooms are also located on the ground floor, while two more and an office occupy the first floor. Stairs lead up to a terrace on the roof that can be used for hosting events.

We recently grouped together all our stories about red buildings - see them all here.

Photography is by Fernando Alda. See more images of this project on Alda’s website.

Here's some more text from the architects:

"A connecting point, a meeting point"

We are interested in investigating the conformation of a physical space which, devoted to virtual connexions and information, becomes a real ‘meeting point’. We want to propose through architecture the confluence of ‘sites’ for both virtual and material social networks.

Information Technology has re-configured the human being and its social relationship. Information has unfurled communication spaces and has given depth and thickness to the frugal daily time.

Which meeting places of these intangible spaces can be designed from the tangible production of architecture?

Spaces that might be considered part of the “future”, are already common places in our present that we usually enjoy and share in our homes and workplaces, where we spend our leisure and free times. These are spaces where re-invent the relationship between collective and private spaces, formation and information, communication and dialogue.

Only in counted occasions has architecture proposed a setting in which information and space interact. Sometimes attention to new information technologies has wandered between metaphoric formal exercises and pixelized communication prosthesis. The superimposition of matter and technology to incorporate these flows has created a complexity in the building that sclerosises it. That generates an unavoidable obsolescence that underlines it contemporariness condition.

This is the reason why our research is centered around architecture as the medium for multitude programmes: functions and timings, that means, being a programmable ‘hardware’. We study how to propose a pluripotential container where all flows of users and visitors may enter, where citizens may interact among others. That is, architecture that holds active social ‘software’.

We propose to do less architecture to make more ‘gathering events’ happen: a principle of basic ecology that makes integral sustainability possible as a constructive, economical and social objective.

All social centres are, more than a place, a process where new neighbourhood forms are articulated with ‘agents’ and ‘places’ that are nearby but also with others that are geographic and culturally more remote.

The new Social Cyber Centre Macarena Tres Huertas is a place where such categories as collective/intimate and informational/educative space will be re-proposed.

We think in such places ‘presence’ (citizenry) is more important than ‘permanency’ (buildings), where architecture, in this world of networks and meeting places, is a phenomena in transit. That is why the building is carefully set in its surroundings, put to the residents’ disposition.

DESCRIPTION

The Social Cyber Centre Macarena Tres Huertas competition was organized in the process’ frame of administrative decentralization and progressive establishment of the so called ‘tele-administration’, as the city government (EMVISESA) firmly aims to make available its advantages to all citizens. This implicitly demanded a new spatial medium to provide the local inhabitants with the necessary equipment for computing and information technologies.

Chance, necessity, environmental adaptation.
Almost as it happened to Darwing’s evolution theory, chance and necessity converged (the City Government demands and our research) interceded by local determinations: the surrounding characteristics and the restrained economic conditions.

The district Macarena Tres Huertas is characterized by its high density (eight-floor buildings) dwellings blocks supported by pilots that leave porches on the ground floors. This allows for visual transparency and free circulation among the gardens thus avoiding its perception as an opaque and stagnant space.

Therefore the new 'Macarena Social - CyberCentre' rests in this place generating a visual and transit transversal in order to optimize the accessibility to the surroundings paths and open areas.

The ground floor is released of programme in order to create a wi-fi plaza below the building, a small access garden, which together with a porch linked to a cafeteria and a multipurpose room, are offered as a wi-fi neighbours' meeting and leisure room. Over these spaces, a volume lined with red lacquered sheet arises, where computer labs, workshops and offices are placed.

N-POTENTIAL PUBLIC SPACE:

The main idea is to raise to the power of three the former free spaces now occupied by the building by means of multiply n-times the tangible spaces: garden-wi-fi plaza; multipurpose and connected spaces on the 1st floor, and the flat roof, which is offered to the neighbours as a terrace to hold events and as river viewing point.

PROGAMABLE BUILDING

The new 'Macarena Social - CyberCentre' is designed as a programmable setting, where functional definition will depend on the timing of its uses and the users participation on the given spaces. Only by thinking in these terms, has a functional determination that could damage the survival and natural evolution of the spaces been avoided.

The requirements demanded initially (administration, services and installations) are all risen up and compacted into a nucleus on the first floor, allowing the rest of the space to be free and flexible rooms equipped with computer connections. On the ground floor, the garden and the porch leads us to the access control, a multipurpose room and a small cafeteria, tall in a close relation with the wi-fi plaza. Above it all, the terrace in offered as a motivation for activities and celebrations.

MATERIALS

The new building offers a simple but straightforward image.
Its materials are sincere, so it has a very important significance: red-lacked fold up steel sheet over thermal insulation and brick wall, leaving a ventilated area for climate control. The steel sheet has different perforation densities that allow different levels of privacy and even security. There are several intimacy gradients managed by the ‘gills’ over the windows (vertical lama or banderols that make the building breath), orientated to free spaces, preserving the windows and views to the dwellings’ privacy.

It is a statement on sustainability in terms of normalized construction, organized by structural units and standard module, with serial production process, controlled transport and executing time, that benefits the energy and emission control. The building follows passive construction on order to rationally deal with the extreme weather of Seville: make the most of thick isolation, natural ventilation and natural lightning.

Social - CyberCentre ‘Macarena Tres Huertas’ is a site where traditional categories meet to be re-defined: an advanced technological site, environmentally conscious, urbanly responsible and socially active.

Name Of The Project: Socialcybercentre Macarena Tres Huertas
Architects/Authors: Mediomundo Arquitectos Marta Pelegrín+Fernando Pérez
Programme: Socialcybercentre
Site: José Díaz Street. Sevilla
Competition Date: 2009
Recognizions: 1º Price
Phases: 2009 Compatition, 2009 Executing Projects, 2010 Construction
Contractor: Eurocon S. L. Construcciones
Cathegory: Social Facility
Superficie: 410 M2
Promotor: Sevilla City Government
Co-Designer Architect: Mario Ortega Gómez (Mog-Arquitectos )
Other Contributions: José Antonio Lubiano (Cost Control) Tedeco Ingenieros (Structure Calculation), Elías Pérez Lema (Installations) Fabio Orizia Pérez, Raúl Elías Bramón, Silvia Casitas
Consultants: Fabio Orizia Pérez, Raúl Elías Bramón, Silvia Casitas Montero, Ana López Ortego, Harold Guyaux (Office Team)
Translation: Vincent Morales.

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Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos have completed an underground museum in Spain with weathered steel towers and cylinders that emerge above a grass lawn (photographs by Roland Halbe and Fernando Alda).

Top and above: photography by Roland Halbe

The Interactive Museum of the History of Lugo exhibits objects, images and films that illustrate the historic Roman city and province.

Above: photography by Fernando Alda

Visitors enter the building via a spiralling staircase that descends into a submerged circular courtyard.

Above: photography by Fernando Alda

Three cylindrical towers provide enclosed rooms for audio-visual installations and are surrounded by the underground exhibition galleries.

Above: photography by Fernando Alda

Parking for cars and buses is also provided underneath the landscape.

Above: photography by Roland Halbe

Weathered steel has featured in a few recent Dezeen stories - see our earlier stories about a canopy of flattened parasols and a museum pierced by bullet-sized holes.

Above: photography by Roland Halbe

This is the third museum by Spanish architects Nieto Sobejano featured on Dezeen this summer, following one with a perforated aluminium skin and another in a ruined castle - see all our stories about Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos here.

Above: photography by Roland Halbe

Fernando Alda shows more photographs of this project on his website.

Here is some more text from the architects:

Interactive Museum of the History of Lugo
1st Prize Competition 2007

The building site, which until not long ago housed industrial structures- is located in a position relatively displaced from the historic centre of Lugo. However, it will soon become a point of arrival for visitors to the city.

It may well seem awkward to assimilate architecture into landscape, but this is one of the cases in which we would like to think that the relationship between the two is more than a set phrase. We propose a museum-park or a park-museum, which will be linked to the sequence of green areas in the city, hiding the parking areas underground and emerging in a constellation of cylindrical lanterns scattered throughout a continuous green field.

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As it happens every time an architectural idea is intended to be built –which very frequently emerges from intuition-, it is the analysis of the program and its location that causes the specific proposal to make sense. We will divide the program into two large, connected areas: the parking and the visitor centre. The strong difference in height between the East and West ends of the building site suggests the possibility of taking +444m as an average reference level, in such a way that the garage is developed nearly at street level, thus remaining half-buried.

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The Visitor Centre is essentially organised on a single floor illuminated through large circular courtyards, which allow natural light to penetrate and permit independent, controlled use. From the main courtyard, the most peculiar and tallest exhibition rooms will emerge -as contemporary cylindrical bastions-, which will become the image of the new building which is projected towards the exterior.

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The exhibiting area has been conceived from two types of spaces: one which is neutral, flexible, suitable for the exhibition of panels, and will contain interactive modules or glass cabinets with original pieces; the other is defined by three cylindrical bastions, which are peculiar spaces due to their shape and dimension, suitable for audiovisual installations and projections. Both the Museum and the Visitor Centre are articulated in a sequence of interior and exterior spaces with multiple itineraries in which the landscape and History will be able to convey the intimate link that unites them.

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Awareness towards environmental issues is a consequence of the project’s conception itself. The strong impact that a large amount of vehicles -cars and buses- would have produced on the surface is avoided by hiding the parking area under the undulating cover of vegetation. Likewise, the spaces destined for visitors and the museum occupy a half-buried floor under the same green foliage, which favours thermal inertia, thus reducing the need for energy contribution.

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The exhibition towers emerging from the garden will be externally re-covered by a light, metallic skin, which will accommodate the incorporation of solar panels and night-time lighting in its design, by way of a contemporary interpretation of the Roman wall’s bastions.

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The new Museum will entail the experience of a walk through a vegetative, metallic landscape, a luminous field whose night-time glow will seem to emerge from within the earth. The Lugo Museum will evoke images of fields and caves, walls and fortified towers –metaphors of a landscape and a culture that the inhabitants of Lugo carry within their own memory.

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Location: Avda. Infanta Elena. Lugo. Spain
Client: Ayuntamiento de Lugo
Architects: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, S.L.P. - Fuensanta Nieto, Enrique Sobejano

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Project Architect: Alexandra Sobral
Proyect Coordination: Vanesa Manrique
Collaborators: Borja Ruiz-Apilánez, Juan Carlos Redondo, Bart de Beer, Rocío Domínguez
Site Supervision: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, S.L.P. - Fuensanta Nieto, Enrique Sobejano
Miguel Mesas Izquierdo, Technical Architect
Structure: NB 35 S.L.
Mechanical Engineer: 3i Ingeniería Industrial, S.L.
Models: Juan de Dios Hernández - Jesús Rey, Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, S.L.P.
Project: 2007
Construction: 2008-2011
Construction Company: U.T.E. Aldesa - Cuadernas

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by Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos appeared first on Dezeen.