Studio Banana TV interviews Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas, author of the subtle architectural intervention on the historical Torre del Homenaje in Huéscar, Granada, Spain.
The Homage Tower in Huéscar is a military observation outpost, which, annulled after the conquest of the city in 1434, became domestic. The aim is, 600 years later, to restore the vision of its horizon. Climbing till sight reaches the landscape. To restore here is, above all, to be able to see.
The site was not chosen by chance, but determined by the favorable topographical conditions for building a network for visual control of the territory. But the destruction of the moor castle in Huéscar and the annulment of its Homage Tower impedes the reading of these visual links, the relationship between the built and natural environment, between the monument (as a milestone) and the indefinite extension of its landscape.
The project values the place on these two scales: the near, highlighting the milestone in the urban mesh, and the far, raising a platform as a sort of viewpoint that restores the links between city and territory, between domestic space and landscape.
The intervention show how a contemporary sensitivity values the heritage, both tangible and intangible, that exists here: it gives importance to the Roman headstone field, to walking along the top of the battlements, to the great bulk of the mudwall that forms the Tower, to the horizon. …From this perspective, the past does not exist, but it is built thanks to the historiography and through the project.
Intervention always takes place from the contemporary. For this reason, the revaluation of Homage Tower should be understood as an evocation rather than as a restitution of a morphology unknown to us, always with the utmost respect for the original construction as a document open to future readings. This evocation, this recovery of the horizon, must include showing the defensive nature of the Tower.
It was therefore necessary to make its specific memories visible, i.e., those that come from military imagery. And so the nature of the medieval fences is evoked by a wooden construction the brings back the lookout presence, permits ascent by ramps, and creates new visions and spaces, while recognizing that before its defensive component, the place already had an identity as landscape, and expressed its undeniable geographical and territorial condition.
Interview by Studio Banana TV. Translation by Noelia Correa.
5th European Prize for Urban Public Space 2008. Honorable Mention.
FAD Awards. Finalist in the 2008 City and Landscape category.
