086. Helga de Alvear Museum

The project aims to take its cues from the site and to imagine a possible city that, without turning its back on the present, is capable of preserving how the city breathes, finding common ground between a contemporary quality and its own identity: a form or, more aptly, a strategy that incorporates both aims.

A strategy considered in terms of opportunities, a series of rules dictated by the pre-existing conditions, reinterpreted to make the project into both container and content, a gift for the city.

The site forms a border in the city, both in terms of history, on the edge of the medieval section of the old town, and in relation to geography, rising and forming the twists of a gully. The building returns to the site its quality as a space for transit and exchange, once typical of the areas outside the city walls, while also making it permeable. From calle Pizarro, under the pre-existing façade and through the rear garden, the project unfolds a public route that becomes another link in the chain of squares and alleys that run through the old city of Cáceres, a natural way to bridge the difference in height leading into the new part of the city.

Just as the art, once only the privilege of the elite, is made accessible, the building uses an urban trompe l’oeil in an attempt, if not to eliminate, to distort and dilute the only limit that almost always remains —between what belongs to a chosen few and what belongs to everyone— articulating a public artery through the void, which crosses the private sphere without touching it.

The project is faithful to the essence of the pre-existing conditions. The proposed complex does not differ much from what the site is now: a house with a garden.

The forceful lines remain, the emphatic volumes continue almost intact, a distorted reflection of the orthogonal stone geometry of the 'Casa Grande'; although, its apparent hermetic quality is dissolved in the accessible outdoor routes. It is also a 'house' in terms of its functions, in that it is the location for the administrative offices; but it also provides a 'new house' for leisure and pleasant strolling, which accommodates the storage areas and building services.