*grupo aranea
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grupo aranea es un equipo multidisciplinar que propone y lleva a cabo todo tipo de intervenciones en el territorio.
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During almost 12 years of a trial and error process, passing through many team configurations, aranea has defined a work methodology, where some constants have been consolidate as the most effective and representative, but, to avoid a rigid and repetitive structure, they’re combined with a variable strategy allowing a permanent evolution and enrichment, adapting to each case. Each project begins with a journey and a notebook. Learning from a specific context, taking possession of it, interiorizing it and understanding it’s rules, looking for the marks, the hidden mechanisms from which can rise a project, with no prejudice but an open minded and selective attitude at the same time, which allows detecting the first supports to build the first sketch, which contains the future’s project main lines. The notebook becomes full of sketches, diagrams and data. On the site are taken the main decisions, the essence of the proposal is shaped, guided towards the most natural response by an intuition impregnated with a sensible reading of the context, as a medium transcribing it’s will on the paper. aranea’s architecture is, without any doubt, personal. It is a collective, made of individuals who believe in personal impulse and intuition, in it’s expression, and try to transform it in a shared intuition. Individual and team complete each other in the search of that shared feeling, avoiding an excess of objectivation which would turn it impersonal. All the shaping phases along the creative process become documents for the team’s internal communication, as many personal objectivations of that shared intention. To each problem corresponds the creation of a specific team, resulting from the combination of the permanent members of the group with the external collaborators required by each case, as a response to a specific problem. This strategy guarantees, on one side, to maintain the specificity of the group’s focus and philosophy, thanks to the control and supervision by the permanent members, and, on the other, to give a specialized and competent response, thanks to the professionals of each involved field. The initial intuition is completed with contributions by all the implicated professions, it defines itself, becomes stronger and more competent, taking care of the will the place has entrusted us to express it. Thanks to the agility and flexibility of hand drawings and sketches, the immediate check and communicative role of the three-dimensional models and the materiality of the scale models, these tools before words are the language the team members use to communicate. Intuition and reflection, improvisation and analysis, feeling and reason alternate along the process towards the final solution. Aerial views and photographs snapped on site complete the most material part of this internalization, catching the light and chromatic atmosphere that no other support can reflect with such fidelity. Individual and collective energy complete each other in the difficult balance between suggestion and definition.
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redrawing landscapes “Often, architecture is present, the task of architect is to rediscover it”… We only have to listen to nature, understand its shape, pay attention to its transformation, deduce patterns os action. Steep cliffs, inaccessible bays, speak of incidental, autonomous, discreet, secret interventions… Time will take care of turning them into landscapes. One of the characteristic elements of aranea about its job on the territory is the approach from the materiality. In front of the conventional abstract maps that make uniform / standardize contexts with several / many different geologic and morphologic characteristics, the aerial photograph is the favourite support / medium for / in the jobs of territorial scale because it is the most reliable reproduction of its material, chromatics values, definitively its characteristics features. The work of landscape manipulation / handling on detail photographs from the ground is framed / is included in its equivalent of scale from the top. The rivers, the paths, the limits ... are the lines to redrawing the landscape with. The combing of cultivated lands, the masses of vegetation ... are the textures that complete this operation.
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The collective aranea was founded in 1998 intending to face the wide range of problems architects and professionals intervening on territory are called to solve from the range of disciplines and cultural environments that we consider involved at different levels. The founders were an agronomist and an architect and artist. This first formula was a clear intention to express a different vision of architecture. On one side as inseparable from the intervention on the territory and the landscape, and on the other from the personal and intuitive focus of this intervention, the faith in artistic creation mechanisms for their value as an interpretation of the reality. The key characteristic of this collective is the capacity of taking advantage of the technical knowledge of each professional revealing its artistic and architectonic potential. That makes the firm focusing on both technical and artistic issues, and the combination of disciplines involved varies depending on each problem. aranea’s work is architecture made in Spain. It’s insiders have studied and worked in Spain, as Spanish are most of it’s models and references. Spain has been it’s principal test bench and Spanish is the debate inside which it moves it’s proposals. The local component is an essential part of their work, as it is not an aseptic architecture, it grows from the land it occupies, that is its condition. aranea’s work lays on the other side on something older than the cultural context it arises from. It’s references have more to do with the natural geography than with the political geography. Geological and morphological laws, references to the vegetation and mineral worlds, anthropized or not, are a constant in their work. That’s why aranea’s work is exportable. Due to it’s growing from the local conditions, this sensibility towards it’s natural laws, it evokes the most natural behaviour rules. In aranea people travel and speak various languages since they explore the distance from the local context, and that allows them going through many cultural barriers. A universal language with deep roots in it’s original land.
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La Casa Verde, a vegetable reinterpretation of a traditional house, Sax 2005
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El Valle Trenzado, Elche 2009, 1st prize international competition
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Bardenas, Conservation and study centre of landscape, Navarra 2006
human landscapes ...we advance silently, we try to listen, ... each site dictates its own appropriate guidelines of intervention, we don’t have to do nothing more than discover and interpret them. We don’t seek to define landscapes, we are worrying about the proposals that exist of eliminate the opportunity of intervention. We desire an appropriate intervention that nurtures of subtle actuations, that permits a dialog of the different “actors” of a landscape and also permits superposing gradually trace elements in order to obtain a vivid landscape; but - How to interfere such a potent landscape without suffering losses of its paradise like character? Which scale does the desert have? Our proposal is based on using cultivating techniques with all of its rules and technical requirements like an architectural material and device (schedule, dimensions, methods of irrigation...) in a complex intervention of land art, landscape and architecture in which there are interpositions of a combine over the land, the first lines on a paper are the instrument that creates the drawing and defines the concept. The ground is the essential dimension, the determining factor in the formation of the project; the roof is an extension of the land in that way that one won’t notice a difference while walking upon it.
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INHABITED OROGRAPHIES, rehabilitation of an old quarry in Benzú, Ceuta 2005, prize-winner
We propose a growth pattern based on the reinterpretation of the orographic features of a place. We do not seek a particular state, but we think necessary a time for appropriation and reaction; a time to find new dimensions in those existing orographies.
Man against a colossus.
We opt for an interaction between the necessary and the sustainable. Decisions on density and the field of application are taken by immediate consensus of opinion.
Human erosion, flows outlining the landscape. Let’s channel that erosion. What is the difference between human repopulation and reafforestation? Architecture could shed off some artificiality and try a nature-based approach. In Benzú, both the social and the natural environments are key elements. Ground-tacking systems. A new landscape made at human scale.
Miniature pedestrian valleys, a reinterpretation of cliffs, taming of the water. A human orography. New coexistence rules, management motions, new ephemeral-permanent dwelling patterns Tourism understood as an exchange of experiences.. 1,120 metres of looks into the iberic peninsula.
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INTERWEAVED PATIOS, state school, Rafal 2003, 1st prize “a set of small interweaved courtyards build up a complex playground, many looks meet at every step. Each classroom has its own patio, each patio its rules, small fleeting domains that will shape up their memories�. ...It is like a fortified enclosure, the building shows itself accessible from the interior and opaque regarding the urban context. A spongy texture that expands until it occupies the whole available volume shaping the limits of the plot and leaves a big playground in the middle, witness of every activity and movement of the students. The promenade turns infinite; courts on shadow, covered paths, different levels of terraces, small quiet corners...a variety of feelings follow one another multiplying the space. The classrooms, basic units of the project, form a puzzle of pieces that are connected around the playgrounds. The relations between each piece and the exterior context are different depending on each use and the necessary specific isolation level.
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23 POLA DE SIERO, Housing, Asturias 2005, 1st prize
CASA LUDE, House in CehegĂn, Murcia 2008
24 pH paisajes Habitados (inHabited landscapes) is an emblematic territory units study structure. It’s purpose is to offer a range of models and planning instruments which make possible it’s development careful with it’s landscape value. pH is based on professionals of all the fields implied in territory development, joined at a same work table under the supervision of a coordination team, in charge of providing the territorial unity object of the study a supra-municipal referent coordinating all interventions carried out on it. The participation of the main universities of the professions directly involved in the intervention on territory guarantees the quality of the investigation entrusted to a selection of professionals of recognised prestige and quality students. pH both compiles and organizes dispersed investments foreseen on a territory unit and offers alternative models to promoters implied in the development of show interventions. pH’s aim is to complete along it’s editions a representative map of examples offering a complete range of the most emblematic antropized landscapes. The most indicated places are chosen based upon it’s exceptional landscape characteristics making of a territory unit a representative place, being under an impending development an growth pressure which requires urgent measures, and being in a key moment to determine next year’s course.
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SALAMANDRA, Marinetherapy Complexy Hotel, Gij贸n, Asturias 2002, 1st prize international competition
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How can one place an object somewhere without its clinging to that site ? -- impossible. The object has lingered for so long that it has become a part of the place, it has merged with it, erosion has turned it into a mountain. How can so powerful an object remain behind the wall ? --it must break through, reach the coast, touch the sand, flood, feel the tide flow, get filled with the sea. -- a great forsaken skeleton, a ship ran aground, an old defensive fortress -- time has been kind to it, no one remembers when it arrived, it seems that it has always been there. -- a distinct, directional mountainous city complex --- such dynamic objects do not convey the necessary serenity, we must reflect health ! When does an object become a place ?
MoMa collection
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LA YESERA, Cultural Park, San Vicente del Raspeig 2007, prize-winner
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Do we want an actual building? Is that the most honest and appropriate answer for this location? Are there public places that present themselves to the citizen as an answer to all his complex requirements? A responsible attitude includes disposing a site before disposing a building, includes providing the citizen a custom-made place for spare-time activities and not an empty monument for end in itself totally rhetorical and representative. We seek to blur the edge between building and terrain, to intermingle the program of the auditorium into a landscape that takes over all of the surface and offers the city a public place that participates, an walkable landscape.
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OBS, Urban environmental observatory, Alicante 2009, 1st prize
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transitable orographies, insects, redraws and model’s cementery
SAN JUAN HOUSES, Alicante 2007, 1st prize international competition
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34 Periodical investigation workshops, applied to practical intervention cases, produce specitic typologies which can serve as alternative models, intending to active a change of tendency in the curren development processes, and to generate a debate forum between the main implied agents. To complete the process some of the typological models proposed are putted into practice, as a prototype which can serve as a model and encouragement for future investments.
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Arborizando la ciudad, MARTE, Motril, Granada 2009
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SUNFLOWER, Public Library, San Vicente del Raspeig 2001, 1st prize
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“…you walk by it’s side and it suddenly drags you in. A spiral of books guides you in as the sunlight leads you up… At each turn, the building protects itself… Little by little, these urban spaces give way to a more intimate space where silence is trapped”. We abandon the traditional concept of closed, silent and quiet space to transform it into an alive and vibrant extension of the public urban space. As if it was an ascending street you can go inside without realizing it. Then we feel the vitality of culture, of the different activities, the conversations, the stories, laughs, voices, lessening while we move upward by the slope visiting the whole building. Step by step, we leave behind the initial murmur to stay in a more and more private and silent space.
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We operate on an old, disused building of the beginning of the 20th century. Its original distribution has been modified and the many additions have been transforming the building into a dark and confuse element on which we have to make serious changes. Our principal tool will be the light. Our intervention will be to clean. We propose to transform this old house into a new health and wellness building, a welcoming hotel spa where to stay further away from the city. We will start eliminating some useless additions and opening new courtyards that fill the space of light, taking advantage of the existing drop between the streets around the building, providing more freshness and dynamism to the new house. A big piece of light that, after a 15m void, finally becomes water, providing a magical atmosphere that envelops the greater part of the common spaces.
LA CASA DEL INDIANO, Hotel Spa, Relleu 1999
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URBAN INTERVENTIONS IN BIAR, An Integrated Rehabilition proposal for the old quarter of the town. Biar 2004, 1st prize
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zombiTOUR is an intuitive tour on any scenario capable of drawing the zombie’s attention. the zombie can be drawn by a person or a city, by a subtle sound or a nearby song, rather than by a thought, a flashing memory, a piece of furniture, a shadow, a reflection… when this happens, he will start to walk, and that will generate a zombiTOUR. zombiTOUR is a half-yearly periodical published spontaneously or to order. As long as someone or something wishes to take a tour even of his own steps and arouses the zombie’s interest, he will be able to start a new zombiTOUR. why zombiTOUR 00? zombiTOUR 00 is the starting point of a series of tours. This first one is an experiment in which the subject of the tour is also the object to be toured. This unique event will only take place on this first tour. The sceneries visited are to be found in the works and projects of Grupo Aranea, and in the graphic work of Francisco Leiva Ivorra. throughout these 200 pages, the zombie makes a long journey in which he will have to face and fight his own memories in order to keep his completeness. Ten concepts will recur over and over. Ten unconnected ideas will reach the zombie laden with meaning, and they will become the only connection with the reality he once lived in.
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aranea Is a collective of professionals created with the intention of covering the intervention on territories from a wider range of scales and professions than the traditionally reached by the architect. Was founded in 1998 in Alicante, has its domicile in Spain and moves both at national as well as international level offering solutions to a variety of cultural and geographical contexts. Articulates its professional response in different thematic areas which allow being in charge at the same time of the different open fronts maintaining a common coordination which ensures the respect of the group’s general philosophy principles.
building includes architectural projects in the stricter sense, with various prizes in national and international competitions and built works awarded with prestigious prizes and widely known international reviews and catalogues. infrastructure refers to the projects which for their characteristics and scale are normally up to civil engineers, but for their direct implication in territory definition below to this collective’s field of action. landscape enhances architect’s operational range overlapping it with the agronomist’s field in all those interventions which not necessarily imply building in it’s stricter sense but the handling of natural resources. heritage concentrates on promoting projects and activities aimed to call in mind heritage recovery in both it’s architectonical as in it’s environmental sense. territory concentrates on town-planning pursuing and elaborating instruments that make possible a controlled territory evolution sensitive to all it’s components. art is the tribute to the most artistic component this collective claim in any moment as an essential tool due to its value as an intuition, reading and reinterpretation of reality. It concentrates it’s principal activity in its operative centre, the gallery elcuartomenguante, promoting exhibitions and publications related to art in its wider and current sense and in it’s overlapping with other professions. teaching is in charge for the education of the relation with the territory both from the teaching experience in the main Spanish universities as from the promoting of periodical workshops which generate a permanent debate in which all territory implicated agents in any geographical context can meet. diffusion promotes the group’s works in exhibitions and widely known national and international reviews and newspapers. The group is currently in charge of publishing two reviews: pH paisajes Habitados spreads the conclusions of the teaching seminars and workshops and Zombitour suggests a more irrational point of view of our profession.
// index 05. methodology * 06. redrawing landscapes * 08. philosophie * 10. LA CASA VERDE, a vegetable reinterpretation of a traditional house in Sax * 12. EL VALLE TRENZADO in Elche * 15. BARDENAS, conservation and study centre and landscape, Navarra * 17. INHABITATED OROGRAPHIES, rehabilitation of an old qurray in Benzú, Ceuta * 21. INTERWEAVED PATIOS, state school in Rafal * 22. POLA DE SIERO, Housing * 23. CASA LUDE, House in Cehegín, Murcia * 24. pH PAISAJES HABITADOS (inHabitated landscapes) * 26. SALAMANDRA, Marinetherapy Complexy Hotel, Asturias * 28. LA YESERA, Cultural Park in San Vicente del Raspeig * 29. OBS, Urban Environmental Observatory in Alicante * 31. transitable orographies, insects, redraws and model’s cementery * 32. SAN JUAN HOUSES, Alicante * 36. ARBORIZANDO LA CIUDAD, Marte in Motril, Granada * 39. SUNFLOWER, Public Library in San Vicente del Raspeig * 43. LA CASA DEL INDIANO, Hotel Spa in Relleu * 45. URBAN INTERVENTIONS, An integrated rehabilitation proposal for the old quarter of the town in Biar * 46. zombiTOUR process * 48. Aranea company.
*grupo aranea +0034 965 92 16 95 avenida general marvá nº7 3ºA/1ºB cp/ 03005 * alicante * spain www.grupoaranea.net/blog info@grupoaranea.net