PEQUEÑO ALMACÉN DE CAPAS DE TIEMPO
On the ground floor of number 21 Buensuceso Street, in Granada, this small studio opens onto the city. It occupies part of the lower level of a building once altered by the architect Juan Montserrat Vergés. Some of his gestures are still legible: the checkerboard flooring that survives in certain corners, the arrangement of the courtyards, the marble columns now appearing within the premises, or the decorative elements of the façade that emerge through the everyday. The project begins from this inheritance, from a context that already possesses history, texture, and layers.
The space is long and deep, unfolding between courtyards that cut through it unevenly. From the glazed frontage facing the street, one looks onto a first open courtyard, whose vegetation changes with the seasons and tints the atmosphere of the interior. Deeper inside, the corridor borrows the murmur of the fountain in the central courtyard and, in doing so, seems to widen. At the far end lies the final courtyard, more intimate, to which a new window has been opened: through it enters a measured light, never glaring, sufficient for calm and focused work.
More than a workplace, however, this studio is an extension of the way we understand architecture: a space where different times accumulate, where ideas are tested, and where matter is ordered. It was not conceived from scratch. On the contrary, it emerged from the desire to inhabit what already existed, to activate a silent fragment of the city charged with memory.
The walls that enclose the space were not covered. Some are rammed earth; others are brick, laid with greater regularity or greater caprice, and in them a certain humidity still persists. It was decided to let them breathe, allowing them to maintain that slow rhythm of exchange with the surrounding atmosphere. Their irregular, living surface becomes an active background, another stratum in an architecture that does not wish to forget what was already there.
During the first weeks on site, as attempts were made to resolve the moisture problems, it became clear that much of the structure was in very poor condition. Temporary shoring became necessary and, in that intermediate moment, the props — slender, repeated, metallic — began to suggest a possible strategy. Rather than thickened sections, jacketing, or concentrated and heavy solutions, a fibrillar logic was proposed: a system of multiple slender elements — a constellation of simple corrugated steel rods — densified where resistance was needed and relieved where it was not. The shelving that runs around the perimeter of the studio materializes this logic: where it supports or complements the original structure, it becomes denser and more robust; where it carries no load, it remains light, merely shelving. A single gesture articulating both the constructive and the everyday.
The lighting also gathers remnants from the site. During the clearing of the space, old ceramic drainage channels were found, once part of a now-disused downpipe system. They were reused as light fittings: they now contain the light and return it with an earthy, warm tone, as though sunlight were filtering through soil. This soft and nuanced light accompanies the rhythms of the studio: across the horizontal glass surfaces pass drawings, models, tools, books, and sometimes simply a pause.
This space does not house grand gestures, but rather small decisions that accumulate naturally. The studio operates as a kind of artisanal laboratory, a place where one tests, orders, and remembers. A repository that organizes its layers of time between ancient earthen walls and contemporary structures.
What we were not seeking was a spectacular place, but a truthful one. A studio from which to observe, to project, and also to stop. A space that could be used and inhabited, that could allow itself to be transformed over time, that could grow with us. Like the architecture that interests us most: the kind that is not exhausted by its image, but unfolds through experience.
