One of the most complex and rich elements of the building is the gallery. His subtlety constructive relationship so natural and posed with the court, makes an ambiguous and versatile space. Ambiguous by his dual concept interior-exterior and public-private … and versatile in that it was created as a circulation space protected from rain, is both a meeting place and neighborhood relationships, light sensor, air cool or heat, small garden, etc.. A very sensitive area can capture perfectly the situation of its inhabitants. The gallery defines the courtyard, the gap. The court focused on the plot is the social representation. The permeability between it and the street, allows adequate ventilation of the house. Ultimately the gallery and courtyard are the soul of the neighborhood, a vivid portrait of everyday life.

The home Zayas was one more example of noble residence AlbaicÌn that with time and for various reasons, was renting piecewise other denizens outside the household. Today the building, after the intervention has become one, but inhabited by eight neighbors, all low-rent elderly, by decision of the former owner who gives to that end, thanks to its flexibility, adaptability to change of use, property, neighborhood, dominant taste, etc.. An architectural potential, whose spatial structure, functional, light, formal, etc.. is always open to redefinition and redeployment according to the criteria of value each time.

Keys: Clarity of approaches and media economics. Basically, the building is reduced to a series of horizontal and vertical planes, walls and floors-that shape the inhabitable areas: the courtyard is the void, the absence interior, the galleries as ambiguous limits. All this with a high level of simplicity and minimal specialization.

Everything is recycled: transformable architecture and “nutritious”. Housing is abstract, organic and contradictory. Private enclosures for housing are geometrically pure and functional specialization, internal divisions disappear. Typically, a single area or a series of two or three homogeneously united by voids, usually without carpentry. Each of these spaces are used at random and flexible, depending on the family unit or the specific circumstances of each clan that changes throughout its long life. Specific applications are solved with furniture. Both galleries and courtyards have public use, allowing relations between neighbors. The indoor-outdoor relationship becomes fluid, dynamic and rich: essential for a happy coexistence.

Text provided by the architect.

In this context of successive transformations and architectural alterations throughout history, an intervention has been carried out in order to establish a reading that reveals the events of this place and its relationship with architecture and landscape. The recovery carried out by the architect Juan Domingo Santos is based on the diachronic interpretation of the history of this area through the value of architectural pre-existences, domestic objects and their artistic and interpretive dimension. A set of elements and actions that are located between architectural restoration and artistic installation, and whose relationships extend the memory of the place to the present. The music of the artist Ángel Barrios and his instruments (the piano and the guitar), portraits and landscape paintings of the Alhambra, photographs and family objects coexist in a setting of diverse elements under a private and intimate atmosphere. The intervention is not limited only to architecture, it also incorporates the Alamedilla garden and the remains of a water pool from an old Nasrid palace that are intended to be recovered for public visits and the celebration of musical evenings between the trees and the ruins. medieval in continuity with the nearby gardens of El Partal.

The intervention respects the ancient structure of this heritage complex and begins with a tour that relates the spaces of the Bath, the remains of an old medieval wall from the 13th century and the vision of the Alamedilla archaeological garden in this sequential order, making visible the three most significant elements. The objects and a series of architectural performances on the buildings articulate this emotional walk through history with the artist’s music in the background and the sounds and images projected from the garden. The intervention is carried out from a series of existing windows and other new ones that structure the space and organize the route. The recovery of an old window of the house hidden in an interior wall and the opening of a newly created large window, provide a sequence of perspectives linked to axis and foreshortening, a frequent solution in Nasrid palaces that house rooms connected to each other and with the landscape as belvederes. The new window-viewpoint over the Alamedilla garden is made in the brick wall built in the seventies, blocking the original holes in the façade that remain insinuated as evidence of a previous intervention. This bay window and a carpet with the drawing of the Islamic Bath and the musician’s piano on it, extend the presence of the garden and the view of the pool into the rooms.

Text provided by the architect.