Project: Edificio Goya
Ubicación: San Cayetano, Loja, Ecuador - 3°59'28.1"S - 79°11'36.7"W
Architecs: Daniel Arias Polo, Tatiane Corsi Garcia, David Arias Polo
Architecture study: BEarq + DOSarq + BUDA
Study country: Ecuador - Brasil
Design: Daniel Arias Polo, Tatiane Corsi Garcia, David Arias Polo - Architecture drawing: Jhusep Silva, Javier Villamagua, John Marizaca, Santiago Aguirre, Gabriela Rogel, Ma Inés Villavicencio - Engineering consultant: Carlos Jaramillo, Ramiro Jiménez, Miguel Ángel Cuenca, José Luis Esparza, Juan Diego Febres. Construction: Guillermo Valdivieso, Daniel Arias Polo, Tatiane Corsi, David Arias, Carlos Jaramillo, Fernando Pinchao, Andrés Arévalo, Jesika Jiménez, Oscar Granda, Hugo Bedoya, Rosa Espinoza - Photography: JAG studio
Project description:
Goya Building was BEarq's first real estate project, worked with the firms BUDA and DOSarq, project where in addition to the technical development, a sustainable structure for the entrepreneurship was designed; this commercial condition requires responding to an anonymous user who is familiar with an eclectic local architecture, the result of the accumulated import of outdated foreign styles, naturalized in some way with the juxtaposition of volumes on the modest Loja’s traditional architecture, represented mainly by the colonial courtyard house, typology that would soon become the immediate referent of the project, claiming for us three resources: The volume as a materialization of memory, the courtyard as an articulator of space and the honesty of the material.
The project is located on the eastern mountain range of Loja, in a sparsely densified residential neighborhood; the layout of the land with a negative slope close to 40%, favors sunlight and views to the west, while suggesting a volumetric work capable of absorbing the natural decline. Two towers were projected with heights that respond to the topography, these two blocks generate a central void where vertical circulation has been arranged and which constitutes the organizer of the public space; annexed to it, the common spaces branch out between the different levels of the building, constructing new voids for the public meeting, a conceptual (re) reading of the courtyard; already in the private space, the utility rooms are grouped attached to the public space and parallel to the single axis of circulation, moving the living spaces towards the east-west perimeter.
The building had to become a kind of tribute to the work of the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya, for which a (re) reading of Las Majas on the mural at the entrance to the condominium is proposed, a preliminary recourse to the light-dark achieved in the formal components of the building, where we try to achieve valid contrasts that highlight the volumes; two unique regular brick parallelepipeds topped with the traditional gabled roof, and resting on a base that, equal to the voids in the facade, has been worked in black; the most appropriate proportion is studied to achieve a human scale to the building, necessary to accompany the memory that the volume intends.
The project respects the honesty of the material, the steel structure was pre-modulated in workshops and mounted on the reinforced concrete bases worked on site; the perimeter masonry system is solved with ceramic brick from quarries near the to the city, Malacatos, Catamayo and Susudel, arranged according to the compatibility of the coating with each clay; finally the landscape will become the main material of the project, using architecture as a framework and adjusting the perspectives to the scale of the observer.