[MARIA MONTERO ARADAS] ARCHITECTURE PORTFOLIO
[CV]
architectural graduate · eligible for registration · +353 83 835 3927 · maria.montero.aradas@gmail.com · http://mariamonteroaradas.wordpress.com ·
[CONTENTS]
[FABLAB IN LA CORUÑA] ETSAC - FINAL MASTER PROJECT
WHERE? The location of the Fablab is in San Andrés Street, a classic commercial street in La Coruña. Nowadays, in decadence because of the new shopping centres around the historic city. The street needs new uses to contribute in its recovering, reactivating the activity and the city centre’s health.
WHAT? A Fablab is the space of creation of the XXI century. Specifically, it is a workplace open to the public in which it is put at its disposal a number of machines, computer-aided manufacturing that allows building (almost) everything. It is an open place to the imagination, creation and creativity. It is a place where ideas are welcome and the community thrives on them. The FabLab it is seen as a “magic box” where IDEAS come in and REALITIES come out.
CITIZEN=USER=PROTAGONIST The Fablab is a creation engine that needs the citizens to run, using their thoughts and knowledge. The user is the element that makes it all work, it is the fablab’s gasoline. Thus, the citizen becomes the user, the main protagonist of the project.
IDEAS EXCHANGE
A PLACE TO BUILD EVERYTHING
LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT
WORLD INTERCONECTION
TO SOLVE LOCAL PROBLEMS
RESOURCES COMMUNITY KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE
THE IDEA THE STREET AS A RIVER; THE SQUARE AS A BACKWATER. If we understand that the user is the protagonist of the FabLab and its movement what interests us, we can imagine people as if they were water. We can imagine that San Andres Street is a river and as we want that this river floods and feeds our Fablab, we create a backwater and the street becomes a square.
Under a constant flow rate, if the section increases, the speed decreases. Equation of continuity.
The FabLab rises and releases a place which receives the citizen and invites him to enter. The user will discover the FabLab gradually from outside to inside and thanks to a chain of spaces through which “the river” is flooding everything as a continuum.
THE VOID In the same way that “the river” enters the building and creates a path through the fablab, the sunlight opens its way from the south to illuminate work and public spaces, giving them environmental quality. This is how the sun’s rays “crack” the building, creating a continuous vacuum from the street to the sky that divides the fablab into two sculpted halves: the first one, a “bubble of activity”, and the second one, a volume supported on the horizontal plane of the ground, where it is found the entrance.
IDEAS
SUMMER SUNLIGHT
SERVICES
WINTER SUNLIGHT CREATIVE AREA COMPLEMENTARY AREA
machinery and equipment
services
administration
investigation
creation
innovation
ORGANIZATION. ONE SPACE, DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS. The interior spaces of the Fablab are nothing but echoes of that first public square.It is an open space where users create, think and share. It is one single space with several ambiances. Different environments differ in the ceiling height, creating a continuous path through the building developed by low compression and decompression of the space. The fablab is conceived to interchange ideas and as a place of common energy and teamwork. The communication between floors is open, fluid and free. From one floor we can hear and see what is being done in the other, creating an atmosphere of communication and inspiration. Despite this idea, each of the floors will have a different character associated with the particular activity performed in the Fablab.
MATERIALITY The two volumes are formed by two opposing fronts: the first one, closed, opaque and heavy; the second, open, transparent and lightweight (curtain wall)
[PEDRA DA RA LOOKOUT POINT] CSA ARQUITECTURA
# Building of the Year 2018 - Archdaily. Shorlisted project for Public Architecture category. # COAG Awards 2017. Best Urban Design. # Argentina Architecture Bienal. BIA-AR 2016 # Venice Architecture Biennale 2016. Selected in the Spanish Pavilion (Golden Lion) # FAD Awards to Architecture and Interior Design 2016. Category: City & Landscape.
The lookout point known as “Pedra da Ra� has been used as such since the 1980s, when a concrete staircase was built to climb on the rock and from there one could observe the Atlantic Ocean’s horizon. First, the concrete stair was demolished and excavation and earth movements were undertaken to reveal the rock formation in its original state, highlighting its exceptional geological and formal characteristics. A space was constructed around the stone outcropping that serves as the origin point of a multitude of paths leading to other nature areas. The project has proposed a fundamental transformation. It goes from being a space which is based on the visual, meaning a centralized focus on a specific point, to become a one of pathways and diverse movement. As a result of a search for belonging, the project was primarily based on the use of local materials such as the wild granite, coming from a nearby quarry. Ultimately, the project has attempted to reinforce the flow of movement over the static achieving a set of a unique characteristic, where nature takes center stage and the architecture acts only as a framework..
[PLATO OSTRAVA COMPETITION] MCCULLOUGH MULVIN ARCHITECTS
Recently, the city of Ostrava held a limited competition for a new art space – PLATO - in old slaughterhouses behind the town centre. The building was made up in four separate blocks, high brickwork spaces created in waves through the last decades of the 19th century which evolved into a disconnected cellular plan without corridors. They have a gritty dream-like quality which matches the character of the city - a disparate sequence of halls with slatted windows, metal columns and old concrete surfaces. For the competition, the urban character of the space in the city had to be established and the slaughterhouse spaces maintained as a gritty found space for art. At the same time, they required intelligent transformation into a multiplicity of galleries arranged in a logical sequence as well as spaces for education, tickets, cafÊ and office/workshop and storage.
The project was interesting both for its art and architectural potential - how to do the minimum to the spaces to allow them to work, be linked but not destroy their potential ‘otherness’. Like all intervention projects, a matter of judgement about what to do and not do, but also about forging sequences of gallery spaces which move from very small to large to tall and low and wide imagining widely varied options for display, creating views down from above, thinking about light from the sky or no light at all.
The scheme leaves the building pure, yet makes two significant interventions. The first, an observation tower which signals the scheme across the city in the tradition of its mineshafts. The second, a giant urban crossroads, one route across the site intersecting another linking the galleries, a line cut through soft spots where the fabric allows. The galleries as designed form a powerful sequence of large and small spaces offering every possible combination for the display of great art; certain sections may be closed off and others left open without disturbing the sequence.
[CROKE VILLAS SOCIAL HOUSING] MCCULLOUGH MULVIN ARCHITECTS
Croke Villas is a group of four tall 1960s Dublin Corporation housing blocks, located next to Croke Park stadium on Sackville Avenue. Built as part of a wide- ranging drive to solve the housing crisis of their time, the four blocks have suffered a significant amount of decline and dereliction in the recent past, creating a poor environment for bringing up families. As a result, Dublin City Council (DCC) has acquired some adjoining derelict single storey houses on the opposite side of Sackville Avenue, and together with the four tall blocks this location has been designated as a Strategic Development and Regeneration Area (SDRA). It is the scale of the existing 5 storey blocks of flats that provides the reference for the number of storeys for the proposed development.
The project is planned to be delivered in two phases: Phase 1 is to redevelop the sites of the derelict houses, to create 11 new 3-bedroom houses with their own front doors and street frontage. Phase 2 will comprise the development of 61 no. apartments in two L- shaped blocks with a courtyard garden for residents between them, and an underground car and bicycle parking garage - which serves both Phase 1 and Phase 2. The careful placing of these new blocks, together with the Phase 1 houses, form a new set of relationships and streets which effectively re-imagine the entire site of the former Croke Villas flats. This long neglected area will now become a new urban neighbourhood with its own internal dynamic, with a high quality public realm, newly defined street edges, a defined carriageway for vehicles on the new Boulevard, landscaped streets and gardens, and safe playing space for children within a new-planted courtyard.
[PHASE 01]
CROKE VILLAS SOCIAL HOUSING - 11 HOUSES
BLOCK D - GROUND FLOOR
BLOCK D - FIRST FLOOR
BLOCK D - FRONT ELEVATION
BLOCK C - FRONT ELEVATION
[PHASE 02]
CROKE VILLAS SOCIAL HOUSING - 61 APARTMENTS
1200mmx1200 mm
STORAGE
WINDOW SEAT
PLANTED ZONE ADJACENT TO BUILDING BOUND
PLANTED ZONE ADJACENT TO BUILDING BOUND
PLANTED ZONE ADJACENT TO BUILDING
PLANTED ZONE ADJACENT TO BUILDING BOUND
BOUND 2 BED UNIT PLAN - GF
NTS
N
BEDROOM 1
PART M
STORAGE
DINING
BATHROOM
1200
7500
ENTRANCE - HALL
1700
STORAGE
1200
1800
DINING
4101
BEDROOM 1
4100
2800
KITCHEN
STORAGE
KITCHEN
2800
4200
4200
STORAGE
BATHROOM
STORAGE
STORAGE
4100
2200
2725
PART M
2800
GF
1800
WINDOW S
3875
WINDOW SEAT
ENTRANCE - HALL
STORAGE
3950
LIVING
2300
BEDROOM 2
4051
3300
TERRACE
LIVING
STORAGE
TERRACE
4325
3200
BEDROOM 2
3200
3300
4600
WINDOW SEAT
4175
STORAGE
2 BED UNIT PLAN - 1F NTS
N
3950
BEDROOM 2
4476 STORAGE
2 BED UNIT PLAN - 2F N
N
3300
TERRACE
LIVING
3200 2300
3200
TERRACE
LIVING
3996
STORAGE
NTS
WINDOW SEAT
4600
STORAGE
3300 4429
10
2800
STORAGE BATHROOM
WINDOW SEAT BEDROOM 2
PART M
1200
STORAGE
ENTRANCE - HALL
STORAGE
BEDROOM 1
1700
DINING
7500
4100
DINING
4100
2800
KITCHEN
BEDROOM 1
STORAGE
STORAGE
BATHROOM
4200
KITCHEN
1800
STORAGE
4200
1750
4100
2200
2725
PART M
2800
FF
ENTRANCE - HALL
BLOCK B - FRONT ELEVATION
BLOCK A - FRONT ELEVATION
CHIMNEY
PITCHED ROOF IN ELEVATION
ROOF VOID
+21.970m APARTMENT A37
DOOR TO LIVING ROOM TERRACE
CHIMNEY IN FRONT
KITCHEN-DINING
+18.770m
PITCHED ROOF IN FRONT
APARTMENT A29
DOOR TO TERRACE LIVING ROOM
ROOF VOID
KITCHEN-DINING
+15.570m LIVING ROOM DOUBLE HEIGHT SPACE
APARTMENT A21
DOOR TO LIVING ROOM TERRACE
KITCHEN - DINING ROOM
KITCHEN-DINING
+12.370m TERRACE
APARTMENT A13
DOOR TO TERRACE LIVING ROOM
KITCHEN - DINING ROOM
KITCHEN-DINING
+9.170m LIVING ROOM
KITCHEN - DINING ROOM
ENTRANCE TO COURTYARD
TBC PLANTED AREA ADJACENT TO GAA BUILDING
ENTRANCE TO COURTYARD
DOTTED LINE INDICATES EXTENTS OF BLOCK A BEYOND
SECTION THROUGH BLOCK A, B AND C