Smiljan Radic designs a hotel for Solo Houses
02/11/2022.
[Matarraña - Teruel] Spain
metalocus, ADELA BONAS
metalocus, ADELA BONAS
A model of the proposed Solo Hotel by Smiljan Radic. Image courtesy of Solo House.
Project description by Smiljan Radic
The image for Solo Hotel in Matarraña, Spain, takes its shape from the remnants of a plank of hawthorn wood that was being used to make wooden pegs for one of Marcela Correa’s sculptures. This piece of wood eliminated in one fell swoop the problem of the blank sheet of paper while allowing us to imagine a strategy to occupy the territory. The plot of land for the Solo Hotel is in an unpopulated region of Matarraña in the middle of Europe. It is surrounded by low mountain chains, grey rocks, and pine groves – a wild natural landscape to European eyes.
My project deviates from territorial primitive morphologies, where, by surrounding and isolating, a community can survive in the middle of a hostile natural environment. In contemporary fashion, a simple black pigmented concrete slab seems to lean forward, suspended on wooden stilts over the natural landscape 50 cm from the ground. This slab marks an urban area in the middle of nature; it isolates it (without enclosing it) from a natural environment that constantly invades it. It creates edges and not frontiers, generating a hybrid of natural and synthetic organizations that are plainly recognizable.
Smiljan Radic Clarke was born in Santiago de Chile in 1965. He studied at the Catholic University of Chile's School of Architecture, where he graduated in 1989. Later, he studied at the Institutto di Architettura di Vezia, Italy. After travelling for three years, he opened his own practice in Santiago in 1995. In 2001 he was named ‘Best under 35 year old architect’ by the Chile College of Architects, and in 2009 he was appointed as an honourary member of the American Institute of Architects, USA.
Smiljan Radic has lectured extensively and has mounted several architecture exhibitions on his work, including in 2013 - The Wardrobe and the Mattress, Hermes Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Bus Stop for Krumbach, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; Ilustraciones, Galeria AFA, Santiago; in 2012 - An Orange Tree Noise at the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan and in 2010 Global Ends, Ma Gallery in Tokyo, 2010, and People Meet in Architecture, with sculptor Marcela Correa at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. Smiljan Radic has won numerous contests such the Regional Theatre (Concepción, 2011) and the Telecomunication Tower (Santiago, 2014). His work has been published in several architecture journals and monographs, the most recent being El Croquis N° 167, Madrid, Spain. He currently lives and works in Chile.