Mirasal Development

Torrevieja sits on the southern Alicante coast, between the sea and the twin salt lagoons of Las Lagunas de La Mata y Torrevieja Natural Park. The pink tone of the salinas, visible from the upper levels of the site, defines the landscape character of this part of the coast, low, flat, luminous, with a quality of light distinct from the rest of the Mediterranean. The project works from this landscape condition as its primary reference.

A building that occupies its perimeter.

The plot is a complete triangular urban block on a steeply sloping site within a new urbanisation. The building follows the perimeter of that triangle rather than sitting within it as a freestanding object. This single decision generates the project’s defining spatial quality: the exterior face reads as continuous street architecture; the interior face belongs to a large protected communal garden that the building encloses on three sides.

The street facade and the garden facade are the same building but with entirely different characters, one urban and formal, the other domestic and oriented toward vegetation and light.

Topography as section.

The site falls steeply across its depth. The building responds by stepping its section in correspondence with the natural ground levels rather than overriding them with a single datum. This produces a building of varied section, different ceiling heights, different relationships between floor level and garden level at different points around the perimeter, that nonetheless reads as a single continuous object because the formal language is held constant throughout.

The stepped section also resolves the parking and service areas naturally: they occupy the lower levels, semi-buried, with access from the street at the lowest point of the plot.

Proportion, material, light.

Proportions are horizontal throughout. The material is white. Both decisions are absolute, they hold across the entire perimeter, across the varying sections, across the full 7,214 square metres of constructed surface. The white reads against the landscape’s tones, the pale earth, the water, the sky, without competing with them.

Distant views toward the lagoon extend from the upper levels of the southern facade. The project is oriented toward this landscape with the same precision as its section responds to the topography: nothing arbitrary, nothing incidental.

In collaboration with Julia Alcocer.