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Left Standing

Rendered interior of rough concrete walls, a child sitting in a patch of sunlight from an opening at the end — Light falling through the old concrete frame.

2024

Reusing an unfinished structure
Ibiza. Design studio, UIC Barcelona

On a hillside above the sea in Ibiza stand the concrete frames of a hotel that was never finished. The brief asked for an elite sailing school on the site. Instead of clearing the frames away, the project keeps every one of them and moves in.

Timber rooms slot into the existing skeleton: classrooms, offices, a cafeteria and housing for students, teachers and athletes, about 1,200 m² in all. Each room is a box that can be taken out, moved or replaced, and the frames are opened up to light and to the view. When the sailing school has run its course, the boxes can go and something else can move in, while the structure that was already there stays.

It is a project about care for what is already built, and about leaving a site able to keep changing.

Painted elevation of the hill above the bay, with the empty concrete frames of the unfinished hotel on top — Before: the frames as they were left.

The same elevation with timber rooms and windows set into the frames, and two sailboats in the bay — After: the new rooms moved into the frames.

Diagram of a hand sliding a timber box into a concrete frame, and pulling it out again — Rooms that slide in, and out again. Press to open, and again to zoom in.

Site plan on a textured grey ground: the frames on a rise by a large bay, small analysis diagrams of sun, wind, views and access, and a section of the slope below — The site: sun, wind, views and access, and the slope down to the sea.

Exploded axonometric: the concrete floor slabs and timber rooms of each building lifted above the site, with a numbered list of the programme — Axonometric: ten parts, from the cafeteria to the athletes’ residences, about 1,200 m² in all.

Facade and section of the teachers’ residence and cafeteria: a long two-storey concrete frame among pines, timber rooms and glazing inside — Teachers’ residence and cafeteria: facade and section.

Facade and section of the classroom building beside its first and second floor plans, timber rooms set into the concrete frame — Classrooms and admin: facade, section, and plans of both floors.

Model of a long grey concrete frame filled with pale timber boxes, standing over a cut landscape — Model: timber rooms slotted into the concrete frames.