PLANS AND COSTING REPORT
Toledo's urban structure owns very complex spatial qualities created by some topographical, historical and aesthetic radically genuine factors, therefore the city's architecture has a strong contextual sense; materials acquisition (bricks, timber) and colours (grey, earth); spontaneous rises of middle and remote views; open public spaces and scarcely hierarchic routes; architecture with an artistic value dissolved in a whole.
On this course of understanding the context, we find in Juan de Mariana square some peculiarities of great Interest. The square's orographic determination is completely different from the strategles usually carried out in Toledo, obtaining as a deliberated result the turning of the square in a great viewpoint of the cathedral's gothic tower. As a direct consequence, between the square's architecture. At the same time, it remains the underground galleries through Toledo.
The distribution of the programme starts in a ground floor wich is the access, information point and bookshop storage. Next, three levels are elevated on the square that integrate in a scale the new building with the existing one and receives library services, leisure activities and tourism. Finally, it will be developed a four level tower where the fundamental vocation of this project is set with the creation of the city's new viewpoint.
It was decided to reformulate the library programme to understand it as a place to favour the pleasure of reading beyond a chair and a desk, making the most of the new spaces coming from the plastic deformation of the tower wich invites us to contemplation.
It was tried an approximated lineal circulation, but avoiding monotony vertical movements which starts a very direct relationship with distortion of volumes. Distortions came up with the intention of discovering fixed views such as the cathedral, the Alcazar, and Jesuit Church.
The use of bricks by means of three levels of dullness lattices answers to the same plastic process of volume distortion, with the easy rule of associating to each face a constant value of bricks.
Finally, the square is resolved by setting up a firm connection with the new architecture emerged under. It and a strong vocation of looking at the Cathedral's Tower. Beyond this, the space has been determined through the approach to the description that Pio Baroja did of the square; Those elements as the traditional fountain that characterized the square during the years are regained and reinterpreted to the present necessities.
Con la colaboración de: Julio Palma Tinoco, Inmaculada Navarro Gaspar, Alejandro Perez García y Rodrigo de la O Cabrera.