The Condestable’s House by Tabuenca & Leache Arquitectos // Pamplona, Spain.

We’re off to Spain today, to Pamplona. Tabuenca & Leache Arquitectos have stitched a caliente cultural centre into the bones of an historic town palace. The photos are by Luis Prieto. And frankly, they are so good I wet my pants.

I love history. I love old buildings. I love good adaptive reuse. This is great adaptive reuse. Just enough has been done to the old building to keep it drenched in its ancient, aristocratic past, whilst creating a bang up to the minute public building.

A new stair hall has been inserted into an old courtyard. The world’s simplest iron balustrade (used to beautiful effect at Zumthor’s Therme Vals and mentally programmed for my own house when I get around to it), bare planks for steps, an artfully located skylight, and rough rendered walls to catch the light. This sort of architecture gives me a tickle in my degina which is making it hard to concentrate.

A vaulted ceiling over another stair hall evokes Bagsvaerd in that masterful scoop upwards towards daylight. Another courtyard is capped by deep (and meaningful) timber beams which recall the more ornately figured timber ceilings of the old palacio. Hola!

In some cases the architectural intervention is as simple as little black strips of lighting and a new timber floor. What looks like a new lecture theatre is distilled down to stripping the walls and putting in pews. And what a beautiful room results.

The old building is all stone, bricks and stucco, but these have become worn and pleasantly rumbled with the centuries, to the point where so much masonry looks almost soft enough to lie upon. Old vaults and snappy track lighting abut as happily as if they’d been made for each other. New doors and architraves are gutsy unadorned planks. Look at how beautifully changes in floor level are handled by nicely trimmed terracotta bricks. Bronze (I think) framed glass walls separate a Moorish colonnade from the inside halls.

What a stunning project. Beautifully detailed, beautifully resolved. Suddenly Pamplona is on my must do list – I’m scared of the bulls – and I hope it’s on yours too.

Ende.

Text by Luke Moloney for Yellowtrace.

[Photography by Luis Prieto. Images courtesy of Tabuenca & Leache Arquitectos.]