The building designed by José Ignacio Linazasoro takes place in the ruins of the church of the old Escuelas Pías of San Fernando, destroyed during the Civil War, and in the adjacent plot. The intervention is considered as an urban action reordering the Plaza de Agustín Lara and creating a parking under it. The building will house University classrooms that will occupy the vacant lot, and a library located in the ruins. These two volumes are going to function as a unit thanks to the material character that is going to impose the ruin, which is going to extend expressively through the building.
Description of the project by Jose Ignacio Linazasoro
The intervention in the Escuelas Pías and the environment covers different scales, from the urban, the public space, to the interior design of furniture. It also presents different constructive systems and includes different types of relation with the constructed, from the new plant - delimited by the limits of the solar -, to the intervention.
Despite this complexity, the architect has allowed that the whole had a unitary character. For this, it has been necessary to establish a principle of unity beyond the particular solutions and that could be described as "character" of the intervention.
This is also defined, as in a set of mirrors, by the reciprocal references between the different "buildings" and parts of the project, both pre-existing and new.
There is, in this sense, a particular expressive incidence of materials and textures.
The dominant presence of the ruin in a strong-willed neighborhood, probably the most accused within the city, recently strengthened by an accumulation of ethnic substrates, makes of Lavapiés and the ruins of Escuelas Pías, a place where the complacent solutions of "design" do not fit, but it is necessary to project, be immersed in the enormous load of references that history has been reflecting.
The architectural solution should not be limited to applying preconceived "cliches", but to express themselves through primary, timeless and indisputable values such as material, construction and light, as well as taking into account the brutal and imposing character of the place and ruin.
Lavapies is the last "old" quarter of Madrid, where life occupies everything, as in the streets of Naples or in the souk of Damascus, where the ruins of the old monuments are literally taken advantage of, as in Rome they depicted the engravings of Piranesi.
This ancient and natural way of relating to the past contrasts with the conventional oppositions between "ancient architecture" and "modern architecture", in exclusive terms of “style".
The ruins of the Pías Schools and the emptiness of the Plaza de Agustín Lara are also a living testimony of the tragic events of the Civil War in the City of Madrid, events that have left traces of a tragic and heartbreaking beauty.
All this has revealed the resistance of the walls of the old church, the result of a construction to the "Roman" that was hidden behind sweetened stuccos and overloaded liturgical furniture, but which, naked after the fire of 1936, has endured the increments of the weather and the abandonment for more than sixty years.
The "character" unit of the project does not contradict the multiplicity of its spaces and constructive systems. There is, however, a sequence of internal and external routes that cross the boundaries between buildings, through which all spaces are articulated.
These are related to each other by analogy and contrast.
The project also intends to establish a dialogue between some elements of modern architecture and the great themes of the past through various citations and allusions, as well as to give an account of other contributions of modern art outside architecture and that they surpass the linguistical field but not the conceptual. This last thing is especially for the implantation of the furniture of the Library located as an "installation" in the reconstructed space.
