Spatial Viscosity thru Color

Two recent articles in Bauwelt and Speech feature a nursery by Alejandro Muñoz Miranda near Granada where colored glass plays a central role. The issue of the Russian jounral Speech is dedicated to the theme of color in architecture, and Bauwelt to the theme of kindergartens.

From the Speech text:

Contemporary architecture has returned to two of the most radical formal preoccupations of the early Modern Movement: the aspiration to transparency and weightlessness on the one hand, overcoming bounded space, and the Expressionist aspiration, largely unrealized in its time, to an architecture of colored space... Today the qualities of transparency and weightlessness scarcely seem radical to us, but the concept of space expressively altered through color has only recently become a subject of investigation.

Project:        Nursery, El Chapparel, Granada
Architect:    Alejandro Muñoz Miranda, Granada  

Beyond Transparency 
Speech 06/2010 (released March 2011), pages 208-226.

Das Glasscheibenspiel
Bauwelt 5.11, January 28, 2011, pages 12 - 17.

Photos © Javier Callejas

In the Shadow of the Alhambra

The young Granadine architect Alejandro Muñoz Miranda (1974) debuts with two buildings whose interwoven interior spaces are inspired in the geometric patterns of Islamic tilework. We feature his Granada Business Confederation Building and his Uion Headquarters Building in the latest issue of Bauwelt (German only):

Ein Häus für Gewerkschaften, ein Häus für Unternehmer
Bauwelt 42.09, November 6, 2009, pages 14 -21.

In the headquarters of the Granada Business Confederation, this play involves the virtually cubic space of a central atrium that is illuminated by smaller cubic volumes in three of its upper corners, which house clerestory windows and skylights. The cubic volumes interpenetrate one another, and generate other geometric forms in their intersection....

The interior public spaces of the unions' building respond to a completely different understanding of the uses of architectural space. While the atrium of the Business Confederation is treated as purely formal, static and representational, the interlocking voids of the unions' building are highly social in character, bringing to mind the interior spaces of Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger.

Photos of the projects on the Bauwelt webpage:
Business Confederation
Union Building

First Floor Plan, Union Headquarters Building