Atelier Montijo

The building under study reflects Montijo's industrial heritage, which has gradually been disappearing to make way for bland, generic housing developments. Located in the historic centre, the building (formerly warehouses belonging to an olive oil exporting company), although not formally recognised as architectural heritage, represents significant material and cultural capital. Its location is increasingly affected by flooding during the winter months.

Historically, the riverfront has been central to the town’s economic and social life, but rising water levels and storm surges have increasingly threatened local infrastructure, homes, and natural habitats. In recent years, climate change has exacerbated the frequency and intensity of floods, prompting calls for improved flood defenses and sustainable urban planning.

The project seeks to engage with the spatiality of this building, taking into account new programmatic needs and technical requirements to ensure its survival into the future. The new programme is housing, with complete creative freedom given to consider which typologies might make sense within a structure such as this.

"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in”

Anthem, Leonard Cohen, 1992

Taking advantage of the spatial opportunity offered by the existing roof configuration, the roof has been redesigned to accommodate a new floor, creating an inhabited structure that pulls away from the façades to lend the intervention a sense of lightness. This detachment creates a “crack” that is used as a terrace, where the building’s parapet becomes a balcony.

The proposal thus seeks to recover the essence of the building through its image, spatiality, memory and impact on the city, drawing on the two constructive systems that define the building's identity: mass timber working in tension and masonry working in compression, alongside the presence of a large gabled roof clad in tile.

A hybrid solution is proposed, in keeping with the character of the existing building, where timber structures, metal columns and load-bearing masonry walls are found together. The proposal thus recovers this structural language of tension and compression.

The cores are conceived as infrastructural elements, housing the bathrooms and service ducts — in short, all necessary building technical infrastructure. In addition, to mitigate the impact of stormwater discharge, these same cores also function as retention basins, preventing the rapid rise of water in public spaces during periods of rainfall.

In this way, the building transcends both program and context, standing not merely as housing but as an urban and civic gesture.