Passages vs. Palaces

The itinerary starts with an unusual urban facility such as the Jaén Football Stadium, which carves its section in the rugged terrain to manage the landscape impact and create a viewpoint. The excavated platform rises punctually to enjoy the magnificent views over the agricultural landscape dotted with the mesh of olive trees that extends in gentle hills to meet the wavering edges of the city. And it closes with the Viewpoint 360 in Álora: a similar game in a very different type of intervention. The dynamic and enveloping landscape of the Sierra del Hacho is given to us as a gift that appears by surprise in the tapestry of regenerated public spaces in the historic suburb.

Variable in scale and typology, they are works located in complex situations. High expectations in relation to tight budgets add to the already difficult starting conditions of the already fragile and sometimes punishing intervention contexts. However, the pre-existences of a diverse nature and difficult to manage, such as natural and heritage elements, landscape, historical and industrial traces, degraded buildings to be rehabilitated or qualified, discarded industrial elements to be recycled... stand out above all.In the midst of this difficulty and despite their modest presence, the projects move away from the popular "less is more" (wrongly attributed to Mies) by engaging with the forces that impact and intersect at each site. It is no illusion to think that the presence of an imposing new element could be enough to conjure up chaos.. On the contrary, they are committed to a deployment of resources that, by plunging their hands into the mud, extract extraordinary elements.The small CMedical Centre in Almonaster La Real -singular, without location- bets on a place of difficult access, but deeply marked by the presence of natural elements, to interact with them. A large century-old tree accompanies the building, offering shade, while the large windows transform rooms that are usually isolated and aseptic. The patients can see the skyline of the mountains, invisible from the outside, and fragments of the rural world slip unseen into the rigours of the medical laboratory. Immersed in the rhythm and hustle and bustle of everyday activity, the "architectures of the passageway" accompany the inhabitants and enrich the experience of the environment by selectively enhancing or requalifying certain pre-existing buildings.

Sometimes they are of great scenic, historical or cultural value, other times they are anodyne and are strengthened by the work. The newly built multi-purpose room in a small school in Castilleja del Campo (Seville, 2006) exceeds the requirement of a meeting and work space for the teaching staff, taking advantage of it to improve the existing playground. An appendix grows towards the courtyard, protected by a wall that guarantees the teachers' privacy while serving as a playful support for recreational activities. The new enclosure adapts to different needs, forming spaces to sit in, creating shadows and welcoming new elements such as a swing, a goal... And something as simple as using blackboard paint on the exterior cladding invites children to draw with chalk and perhaps play the role of teachers. This overflow of the commission, which is also an overflow of convention, is independent of the scale and scope of the project.Transits, links, connections

These architectures can be thought of as passages in a metaphorical sense because of how they discover and rescue values in the starting situation to incorporate them as another element of the architectural "display", approaching the world of scenography and even artistic installation. They are also characterised by a certain craftsmanship in the ways of doing things, even when working with industrial elements and processes. The Vuelta de paseo in memory of Federico García Lorca is a transparent route, whose texture is camouflaged by the earth and the sheen of water. Only a few will discover it in the bushes. It brings to the present the silent walk that García Lorca was forced to take in this place before his death, but also what was his great legacy: poetry.

The revitalisation of the existing sometimes concerns cultural passage and memory, sometimes material heritage. The white stone pavement of the stop on the road proposed by the Mirador 360 in Álora is treated scenographically to accompany the procession of the via crucis that passes through the place, bringing out the values of the cultural landscape. The railing is just a small vibration superimposed on the views and punctually helps to interpret them, pointing out the most important landscape features with aerial and perforated texts attached to the handrail.This modus operandi is not only found in landscape interventions, but also in building. In the rehabilitation of the dwellings that filled an old and intricate palace house to create 5 dwellings and a commercial space in El Pópulo, the powerful 18th century walls are recovered and reinterpreted in contrast with a delicate surgical operation. It provides each room with ventilation and lighting while taking advantage of the casual and arbitrary to enrich them. These links and connections result in the permeability of the building envelope, which blurs and becomes part of the layering of the urban environment or the landscape, returning attention to it when the occasion arises.

These works are also passages in the most literal sense of the word: they pay special attention to the experience of transit, fluidly and selectively linking existing and new routes. The Pópulo dwellings, for example, recover the passageway that once formed the arm of the plot connected to the small square next to the New Cathedral, creating a private street on two levels and partially covered, ventilated and illuminated through two courtyards and a large opening in the façade. Sometimes these transits fork and unfold to connect spaces or multiply the possibilities of mobility, sometimes they expand vertically or become labyrinthine, introducing small pleasures into the transit experience. From the large entrance door of the Lobres Swimming Pool a slope coming from the street leads you in the half-light towards the luminosity of the artificial valley hidden in the plot, taking advantage of the difference in level of more than 3m between the ends of the plot. The walk leaves the village behind and rediscovers it in a strange and playful place. The collective memory associates the sloping solarium surrounding the swimming and recreational pools with an open space with natural qualities.

The Bambi Early Childhood Education Centre (Córdoba, 2014) also takes advantage of the existing 7m difference in height. A zigzagging route crosses the two levels of the building and connects them to the public road, while allowing all the classrooms to come into contact with outdoor spaces: open-air recreation areas on the lower level and large open galleries on the upper level. Architecture is enriched by transits, sometimes even transformed by them. The House of 141 Doors contains two intertwined passages. The staircase-library on two levels connects the bedrooms in height and leads to an expanded reading corner on a terrace overlooking the decks and the nearby gardens. On the platforms of each level, 141 recycled doors, salvaged from a former warehouse, form an interior skin that replaces the usual partitions. The transits merge with the rooms, whose dimensions, materiality and atmosphere change with the rhythm of the daily activity that requires opening and closing the doors. During family gatherings and occasional parties the house is transformed into a single three-dimensional, labyrinthine passage.Passages vs. palaces

Passages vs. palaces is an itinerary made from a gender perspective. Beyond the fact that women are the main architects in all these works, and also the author of this story, the desire is to highlight architectural qualities that have begun to be reclaimed from a gender perspective. These include attention to the everyday lived experience of architecture, physical mobility and the experience of transit, the scenographic and sensorial display, the convergence of different trades and media related to design, complicity with the context, the rescue of artisanal processes, interest in the aesthetic, psychic, cognitive, emotional pleasure and enjoyment that architecture can offer....One of the most remarkable aspects is that they give a communicative value to technologies and building materials, showing that they are "mediating" elements in cultural relations. This is an interesting reversal. Architecture has often been responsible for consolidating the physical and conceptual boundaries that define and distinguish the private and the public, the domestic, the urban and the rural, the present and the past, the existing and the new construction. These seemingly distinct aspects overlap and intertwine in these passages, thus facilitating an enriching contact between situations, activities or conditions that do not usually occur together. The architectures of passage, in short, question the delimiting and organising role usually attributed to architecture in order to show us its role as a generator of links that extract meaning and opportunities for enjoyment even in difficult, changing and disjointed situations.

While there are many works that could represent these values, the broad spectrum of possibilities covered in this selection is of didactic interest. But there is something else. They are works that, due to their eccentric location and modest presence, have had less opportunity for projection than others. And their particular contribution is not easy to communicate through the usual coding in the large digital broadcasting platforms. The landscape and connective character, centred on the bodily experience, the commitment to the dissolution of its limits, the simultaneous attention to the different scales that converge in complex situations, the explosion of spatial and visual relations are aspects that are difficult to capture through the still image. But precisely because they find it much more difficult than others to achieve the media impact that has almost become today's measure of value, they can help us understand the limitations imposed on us by the present. The "passages" are committed to the management and improvement of starting situations as complex as they are suggestive, in which they position themselves as a mediating element capable, moreover, of challenging convention and what is assumed to be true and important. With this itinerary we wish to rescue this learning, not to propose a model to which all architecture must aspire, but as a possibility that is not exhausted and of great value.