Located in an enclave with a high historical burden, between the Puerta de Jerez, the Hotel Alfonso XIII and the Royal Tobacco Factory (today the University of Seville), is the former College-Seminary of the University of Mareantes, a benchmark baroque building Sevillian built from the end of the 17th century to the end of the following century, which would end up today by giving shelter to the headquarters of the Junta de Andalucía.
From the beginning, we can find certain parallels with the Andalusian Institute of Historical Heritage (Santa María de las Cuevas Monastery), another important work by
Atelier Vázquez Consuegra. In both cases, these are long-lived buildings that have had to adapt to new and often unlikely uses. Such is the case of the Palace of San Telmo, which although it was not constituted as a building for war purposes (as if it happened to the Monastery), was part of a religious past, during its period as Metropolitan Seminary, a period that would be the architect of the greatest architectural, material and typological losses in the history of the building.
In the same way that the building was changing its uses over time, the interventions were happening without precautions and contributed to the heterogeneous reading that it came to acquire during the 20th century.
The intervention that the Sevillian study proposed was based on a principle that was also very similar to the one that had been adopted more than ten years earlier for the IAPH. The principle of acting comprehensively throughout the building, meeting the requirements that it itself requested, without limiting itself to a specific type of work, but with strategies that ranged from new construction to rehabilitation, recovery, reconstruction and restoration.
We should also mention that the relationship between
Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra and the palace had already begun almost twenty years before when the architect was commissioned to restore the façade of the building and continued for some time with the first works of the restoration phase. at the end of the 1980s. This long relationship with his work, which we see is almost a leitmotif in Vázquez Consuegra's heritage interventions, finally allows a looseness and an almost trustful treatment with the building itself that, by dint of necessity, are encouraged to ask the architect to save him, to give him one more life.
That is how Vázquez Consuegra managed to resurrect this iconic and dejected palace, balancing, as they had already proven to know how to do, pre-existing materials such as slate and stucco, with sublime diaphanous spaces with pristine white and grey finishes, which merge with the ocher, blue and reddish tones of the recovered areas.
As part of the same intervention, the studio was in charge, together with Agronomy Architecture, of the palace gardens (which had been sold at the beginning of the 20th century to form part of the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929), projecting a series of spaces built in concrete with open and semi-covered rooms, a longitudinal fountain and facilities that intersect with the vegetation of the place and permeate the limits of the satellite buildings (all new constructions) with their evergreen leaves.
This year, during the first edition of the Seville Open House, to be held between October 21 and 23, the doors of this palace will remain open to the public for their visit, and will even have the accompaniment of the very study that was commissioned of the project.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-