Business Publications

Attic stories: with simple forms and fine materials, new offices give Cadiz's skyline a contemporary lookout post

Architectural Review, The, June, 2003 by Rob Gregory

Through the passage of time, the dense and narrow street patterns of Cadiz have caused the city to rise up to conquer a new realm on top of its buildings. By exploiting the benefits of the warm winter sun and the cool offshore summer breeze, roof gardens flourished during the eighteenth century, articulated by the distinctive and widespread lookout towers that have helped to define the image and character of the city. Adorning the city's harbour facade, these aerial structures that surrounded the north-eastern side of the bay provided expansive, spectacular views of ships returning from across the sea; a tradition recently reinterpreted by local architect Tomas Carranza in his design for this new and contemporary attic storey.

Behind a discrete yet generous full width terrace, new reception, office and boardroom accommodation now occupy the top two floors of a house that had previously lost its lookout tower. Through his use of pure forms, a limited palette of materials and his sensitive manipulation of light, this new collection of spaces exhibits the proportions, planar composition and detailed refinement of Mies Van der Rohe. With glazed screens held delicately between the uninterrupted floor and ceiling planes, slender stainless-steel columns, and with service cores, lavatories and stairs neatly contained within deliberately placed and powerfully composed pieces of finely crafted furniture, the spaces contrast notions of solidity and lightness, transparency and opacity.

On the lower level, glazed screens subdivide the working area by alternating between translucent and opaque glass panels along the space's longitudinal and transverse axis, while from behind the centralized reception desk, a secret staircase carves its way through to the boardroom above.

As an empty prism-like space, the boardroom is dominated by the panoramic view across the sea. Framed by the cantilevered soffit and the stone bench that shelters the external terrace, this delightful new volume that is flooded with eastern light, holds the distant horizon and creates a dramatic new vantage point from where to view the City of Light.