Architecture of textures in dialogue with La Sagra (UNDER CONSTRUCTION)
The Cortijo Molina is located near the peak of La Sagra, in the Huéscar Region (Granada), a region where the monumentality of the landscape constantly dialogues with the scattered rural buildings. In this high altitude enclave, the contrasts between the mountain mass, dryland crops, stone terraces and native vegetation make up a palette of textures and colors that changes with the light, the wind and the seasons.
The rehabilitation and expansion project of Cortijo Molina is built from that sensitivity towards the landscape. The proposal is based on respect for vernacular construction logic, but allows for material and compositional reinterpretations that connect with the present and open new possibilities of inhabiting the territory.
Textures that read the landscape:
One of the most significant gestures of the project is the attention to the texture of the exterior facades, conceived as a material extension of the landscape. Rough coatings, stone finishes, eroded or pigmented surfaces using traditional techniques allow the building to not only visually insert itself into the environment, but to form part of it.
The façade is not a simple envelope, but a surface of dialogue with the terrain, with the slope, with the geological strata visible in the mountains. The roughness of the walls refers to the living rock of La Sagra, while the changes in tone and shadow evoke the tilled fields and the folds of the parched earth. The result is a farmhouse that does not compete with the landscape, but rather prolongs it.
Between the ancestral and the contemporary:
The project respects the volumetry of the original farmhouse, maintaining its longitudinal layout and its essential spaces: oil mill, stable, warehouse and housing. However, the interiors are reinterpreted under contemporary criteria of spaciousness, thermal comfort and energy efficiency. The new structural interventions are expressed with sobriety, resorting to materials such as exposed concrete, local wood and rusty iron, in a strategy of constructive and tectonic honesty.
As in other projects on www.alvarogor.com, the architectural language of Cortijo Molina does not seek nostalgia or replication, but rather conscious updating: an architecture that understands the past as active material to build the present.
Telluric architecture:
The Cortijo Molina is not only a house in the countryside, but a telluric architecture, deeply rooted in the land that supports it. Its shape, color, texture and temperature emerge from the physical and cultural conditions of the place, in an exercise of precision and humility. The building thus becomes a silent witness of the landscape of La Sagra, and another piece of the natural and human story of the Huéscar Region.
