Residential area for a religious community

Place: Burgos
Date: 2009-2010
Developer: Iesu Communio
Design/direction: Eduardo Delgado Orusco & Miriam García García
Team: Juan Enrique Álvarez, Alberto Comas, Miguel Quirós

The monastery of La Aguilera meets the requirements of a Religious community “Iesu Comunio” in an old Franciscan establishment of the XVth century. The project consisted in complementing the original built plan of the monastery by adding new buildings that were set out as independent from each other: a church, with an interior space favoring a participative liturgy with the pilgrims; several visiting rooms and a specific zone for religious training inside of the enclosed monastery.

Likewise, a treatment of the exterior surfaces is achieved, in the area dedicated to the religious nuns as much as in the area of the pilgrims. This resulted in the elaboration of a collection of open spaces parting from the great reception square of the ensemble, to the interior recreation areas. The overall geometry of the new intervention is the reflection of a metaphor based on the traces that raindrops leave in the ground, approaching this idea as also an image of the relation between sky and earth.

The buildings, having a circular plan, colonize the available surface in an apparently random manner, forming an open landscape. At the same time, the planning of the exterior spaces related to the pilgrims follows a similar pattern, taking advantage of the limits of small squares as well as other spaces adapting to the levels of the land.