The Mandeo Ethnographic and Cultural Center
A building to house the training Center for the Interpretation of Cultural and Ethnographic Values of Mandeo in the municipality of Curtis, located in a natural setting of outstanding natural beauty.
The building is a stop on the way, an element that is interspersed with trees, evoking the idea of a cottage trying to fade into the landscape.
The chosen strategy is fragmentation and integration with nature, the building as part of the way.
The plot is located in the middle of a forest, at the rear of the plots of small cottages, lost in a green and quiet environment, with access almost blurred.
The aim thus is the fusion with the field, a building that suits the scale in volume and height, thus resulting in small modules that bind to host the program without breaking the volumetric configuration of the place.
The building is designed with concrete clothes resounding and concise totally blind and is sieving with wooden slats in reference to traditional buildings. The building evokes the typology of "palleiros" so widespread in our culture Galician buildings that usually serve as storage, drying, etc. The resulting piece is the sum of four modules that come together and create a sequencial trip, a path in the woods that flows through the nature of the plot.
We have done pioneering research work, introducing the use of self-compacting concrete in the design of complex geometries. The roofs with different inclinations and specific situations for each of the various joints, required careful design of the concrete formwork. By using self-compacting concrete (injected to the lower parts of walls and roofs) in the configuration of various volumes, we have made possible the homogeneity and compactness of these, allowing a continuous perception that with another type of concrete wouldn’t have been possible. In turn, the use of self-compacting concrete has been solved with a single material in all the building, the structure and the coating, reducing costs.
We have designed a building with a strong rural character interacted with the environment. It begins by being a linear piece that breaks into four modules adapted to the scale of the place and the course of path. It generates a series of volumes that can operate independently or together, giving versatility to the piece. The cover is solved with a hipped traditional solution that lets in natural light through skylights at the top. The four decks are joined according to the needs of hosting space, forming a unique profile in terms of relationship with the existing environment.
