Bring the community together. Town Hall in Valverde de Campos by Óscar Miguel Ares
21/01/2024.
[Valverde de Campos - Valladolid] Spain
metalocus, CRISTINA RODRÍGUEZ
metalocus, CRISTINA RODRÍGUEZ
Town Hall in Valverde de Campos by Óscar Miguel Ares. Photograph by Gabriel Gallegos Alonso.
Project description by Óscar Miguel Ares
Valverde de Campos is a small municipality in the Montes Torozos, just over twenty kilometers from Valladolid. It has just over a hundred inhabitants and decided to invest the surpluses produced by the wind farms in a service structure that in turn was a Town Hall, a teleclub – including a cafeteria – a medical center, and a care center for the elderly; a building with just over three hundred square meters covered but connected by squares and interior streets.
The construction is conceived as a street with arcades. The building solves an urban problem by connecting, in its upper part, an urban space in the cul-de-sac with, in its lower part, the main square. Its interior route is through streets – sometimes covered, others supported – and a small intermediate plaza on which the doors of the different uses that make up the construction open. In this way, the building becomes more complex, becoming not only an equipment structure but a small city; making good the words of Aldo Van Eyck of a city in a building or a building in a city.
Town Hall in Valverde de Campos by Óscar Miguel Ares. Photograph by Gabriel Gallegos Alonso.
The stone stands as the tectonic protagonist of the building and as an identity resource. The municipality chose its history by carving the nearby limestone; from its fountains, church, mansions, and now its new Town Hall. Identification with the community had to be made from the most significant elements, waiting for its acceptance and welcome. The stone exercises that function, are also chosen and selected in the surroundings of the town. Economy of proximity, which is no discovery for the inhabitants who stain their faces with the wrinkles of time. In addition to stone, wood, or washed concrete, they exercise their manifest will for the building to navigate between tradition and modernity.
As in other municipalities, in the middle of less populated Spain, the construction of a facility transcends the recreational function it may have in cities to become a dynamo against depopulation. Not so much to attract new residents, but rather to prevent more from being lost. Services, which are perhaps more necessary in rural, abandoned areas than in large population centers. It is in these towns where construction – as it should be called because it becomes an event – transcends the concept of a building to become a places where community life can be exercised. In them anything can happen, they are supports for hope.
Óscar Miguel Ares. Valladolid, 1972. Archtiect from School of Architecture of Valladolid, in 1998. In 2010, he obtained the title of Doctor from the University of Valladolid - for the thesis "GATEPAC 1928-1939" - being his tutor Mr. Juan Antonio Cortés. Since 2013 he is professor of design at the ETS de Arquitectura de Valladolid. He has collaborated, as visiting professor, at ETSA La Salle (Ramón Lluch University, Barcelona), at San Pablo CEU University (Valladolid) and at the School of Design at Al Ghurari University (Dubai, UAE).
His texts and works on architectural criticism have been published in different publications as well as by the composition and projects departments of the ETSA Madrid, UPC in Barcelona –with whom he has assiduously collaborated as editor in the publication DC Papers-, ETSA in Seville and ETSA Cartagena. He has given conferences and lectures in Helsinki, Mexico City, Porto, Pamplona, Barcelona, Madrid or Seville. Author of the book: "Alternative Modernity. Transits of form in Spanish architecture (1930-1936)" University of Valladolid (2016).
Since March 2012 he has been carrying out his professional work alone, together with the architect Bárbara Arranz, under the Contextos de Arquitectura y Urbanismo brand. As an architect he has won various competitions, his work being awarded at the XIV Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism 2018; work exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion of the XII Biennale di Venezia (May 2021); selected in XI Biennial of Ibero-American Architecture of Architecture and Urbanism Paraguay (October 2019); finalist in the 2018 FAD Awards; finalist in the 2017 Spanish Architecture Awards; selected Enor Awards (2020), Awarded with the American Architecture Prize (New York, 2017, Bilbao 2019); Awarded with the International Architecture Awards 2018 granted by The Chicago Athenaeum / Europeen (Athens, 2018); Awarded with The Plan Award, (Venice 2018, Milan 2019); more than a dozen awards and mentions at the Castilla y León Architecture Awards (2009, 2011, 2016, 2018 and 2020), as well as awarded at the Castilla y León Sustainable Construction Awards (2017 and 2018). His works have been published in numerous national and international magazines, including METALOCUS, Domus, Arquitectura Viva, Tectónica, Hic Arquitectura or Baumeister, On Diseño and he has exhibited in Madrid, Seville, Venice, Paris and New York.
Director, together with Anna and Eugeni Bach, of the XV Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, "Empty Spain / Full Spain; conciliation strategies", forming part of the different juries of the awarded categories.
2016 2015