Smiljan Radic
The image for Solo Hotel in Matarraña, Spain, takes its shape from the remnants of a plank of hawthorn wood that was being used to make wooden pegs for one of Marcela Correa’s sculptures. This piece of wood eliminated in one fell swoop the problem of the blank sheet of paper, while allowing us to imagine a strategy to occupy the territory. The plot of land for Solo Hotel is in an unpopulated region of Matarraña in the middle of Europe. It is surrounded by low mountain chains, gray rocks, and pine groves – a wild natural landscape to European eyes.
My project deviates from territorial primitive morphologies, where, by surrounding and isolating, a community can survive in the middle of a hostile natural environment. In contemporary fashion, a simple black pigmented concrete slab seems to lean forward, suspended on wooden stilts over the natural landscape 50 cm from the ground. This slab marks an urban area in the middle of nature; it isolates it (without enclosing it) from a natural environment that constantly invades it. It creates edges and not frontiers, generating a hybrid of natural and synthetic organizations that are plainly recognizable.
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