Completed in 2017 by the late Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas, the Alcázar Genil Metro Station in Granada, Spain, is a one-of-a-kind challenge, mixing engineering and heritage issues, echoing Torrecillas’ lasting search for “contemporaneity through the vernacular”.

Removing solid, substracting matter: isn’t excavation the early form of every construction? It is resonant that the same etymology serves to allude to the structural basis of our buildings or to a pioneer human settlement, as well as to designate a transcendental idea or the primal action of all creation: found, foundation or fundament.

The project of the Alcázar Genil Metro Station in Granada for Junta de Andalucía, by the deeply missed architect Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas, who died prematurely in 2015 at the age of 53, is a beautiful demonstration of this challenge, which has exalted his approach to the past and to tradition through space and matter. The blissful combination of place, programme and project results in a fascinating architecture, which is both modern and atavistic, a kind of immersion in an atmosphere somewhere between engineering efficiency and the suggestion of a ruin, like a journey through time, between the cave and the machine, in which one manages to be simultaneously in a speleological adventure and in an ultramodern gallery.

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Part 3

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