Wildlife Observatory, Los Pedroches

About

Guided both by tradition and common sense, over the centuries the people of Los Pedroches Valley – a protected area between Extremadura, Andalucía, and Castille – have cherished the holm oaks that cover the valley’s meadows as if they were sacred trees. However, such radical protection of the trees has conditioned the architecture of the valley more than it has its landscape, because the lack of wood for construction led to the use of granite – Los Pedroches – as covering material and, therefore, to the cloister vault as structural solution. The result is that the oaks characterize the meadows, and the vaults the architecture in the region. Unfortunately, these vaults are an endangered species under the agressive invasion of new building techiques, more standardized perhaps, but also less significant. In the year 2013, the project to build a wildlife observatory brought the opportunity to revisit tradition with the construction of a rectangle of webbed vaults as a sheltering sky from which to observe the protected species. The observatory somehow stands to represent the ironic fortune of an endangered architecture at the service of a protected landscape.

Sources

• Arquitectura Viva