Europe 40 Under 40 Awards Tell a friend

Europe 40 Under 40 Awards ARCHIVE 2014 40under40
Sol89 - María González - Juanjo López de la Cruz - DAYCARE CENTER - Spain
  • Sol89 - María González - Juanjo López de la Cruz - DAYCARE CENTER - Spain
  • Sol89 - María González - Juanjo López de la Cruz - DAYCARE CENTER - Spain
BACK TO ARCHIVE
Sol89 - María González - Juanjo López de la Cruz - DAYCARE CENTER - Spain

Maria-y-Juanjo

Flag_of_Spain   40

 

Biography

María González: December, 24th 1975, Huelva, Spain
Juanjo López de la Cruz: December, 24th 1974, Seville, Spain

María and Juanjo are Architects, graduated from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Sevilla (ETSA Sevilla) of the University of Seville in 2000. They were tenth and third in their class (of a total of 348) and were awarded the highest grade in their Final Degree Projects, which also received both prizes in the 13th edition of the Dragados Final Project awards. After a one-year scholarship at L´École d´Architecture de Paris-la Seine in France, in 2001 they worked for the Spanish architect Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra. Following this experience they established their own office en 2003, Sol89, a practice in which they strive to accommodate research, teaching and professional practice.

Over the years, Sol89 has had the chance to carry out and build projects from which to approach the intermediate spaces of the city as well as the reuse obsolete structures. This work has been widely published in specialized national and international magazines and journals. The practice has received prizes in competitions and national and international awards for its built work, the most recent being the Silver Medal of the Fassa Bortolo Prize (Ferrara, Italy, 2103), the Weiner Berger First Prize in urban infill category (Vienna, Austria, 2014), the Grand Prix Philippe Rottier of European Architecture (Brussels, Belgium, 2014), Silver Medal of the Fritz-Höger Preis (Berlin, Germany, 2014) and have been finalist in the current editions of the Spanish Biennale of Architecture and Urban Planning (Madrid, 2013). They have been invited to lecture about their work and participate in design workshops in various Architecture Institutes and in most of Spain’s architecture schools.

They are associated professors in the Department of Design of the Architecture School in Seville since 2005, hold a Masters Degree in Architecture and Sustainable Cities (2008) and are currently working on their doctoral thesis about key local and global issues in contemporary architecture design. Their professional and academic career also reache the field of architectural thought; in 2008 Juanjo became founding members of the academic journal Proyecto Progreso Arquitectura, indexed by AVERY and part of the catalogue of Harvard and Columbia Universities. They have published articles and given talks in different conferences, as well as directed seminars and meetings, such as the International Congress dedicated to the work of Jørn Utzon for the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (2009) and the annual seminar Acciones Comunes (2013) for the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo about artistic and architectural strategies that intervene in the intermediate spaces of the city.
They are the coauthors of the book Cuaderno Rojo (University of Seville, 2010), and authors of Proyectos Encontrados (Recolectores Urbanos, 2012) as well as El dibujo del mundo (Lampreave, 2014). In this order, these books are reflections about research in architecture design, the debris of contemporary architectural culture and the idea of journey and drawing in the work of architecture.

DAYCARE CENTER

A public building should be able to not have doors. We think of these buildings as technical fragments from the connected public space network throughout the city that retain their belonging to the nature of the streets, squares and gardens. From this discussion we propose that the Daycare Center become a transit device that reconciles the city and the abandoned park where it is situated, conceiving it as a playground. The daycare center bends and folds to meet with the plane of the park sited eight feet below the road, establishing a relationship of maximum transparency and complementarity with the degraded park for inducing its recovery. This notion of nexus that joins different links of the public spaces suggests slow transitions between public spaces and the building interior, by inserting two cushion-spaces that allow a paused access through the north ramp and the deep porch south. We dilute the boundary between the inside of the nursery and the outside of it and we reconcile the public and the private space.
NEXT/PREVIOUS
METROPOLITAN ARTS PRESS