Architectural Design Archive
El Manzanares
This project deals extensively with something we might call “landscape intelligence”

We acknowledge the landscape to be a matrix of possible conflicts, the crossing of modes of relation appealing not just to architecture but also to history, ecosistemics and politics.

Water, earth, stone... and a monastery able to integrate and feed a patch of land as long as it does host self-organization and thus becomes a device devoted to producing a life in a commons regime.
In our monastery, the sheer presence of water and the understanding of the land, its diversity and complexity do have a capital relevance to explain the sustainability of the whole complex.
Water lets the orchards and fruit trees grow, makes the mills able to work, produces energy and contributes to organize the ensemble along with the particular uses of each space while delivering a careful -literally curious- relationship with the landscape and ourselves indeed,

Archeology and history shall provide here the starting points for some radical imagination which does begin considering the actual ruins of the old monastery while being aware that stones are not silent at all, but they keep explaining us a wholly different way of understanding life and its fertile roundabouts.