A culinary school in a former slaughterhouse in Medina Sidonia

Medina is a historic town on hills in Cadiz. Its houses are known for the whitewashed walls and the ceramic roofs. The project involves adapting an old slaughterhouse, built in the XIX century, into a Professional Cooking School. The ancient slaughterhouse was composed by a small construction around a courtyard and a high white wall that limits the plot. The density of the architecture of the old building, where brick walls, stones and Phoenician columns coexist, contrasts with the empty space inside the plot that was used to keep the cattle. The project proposes to catch this space through a new ceramic roof that limits the new construction and consolidates the original building, this new roof wants be a contemporary reflex of the roofs of historic city. This roof lends unity to the built complex and interprets the traditional construction of the place, ceramic roofs and whitewashed walls. Some little courtyards are inserted, working as ventilation shaft, and are cultivated with different culinary plants which are used by the students to cook. At the original building, ancient floors were replaced by slabs of concrete with wooden formwork that recognize traditional building forms, walls are covered with white and rough lime mortar which seeks material memory of its industrial past, and the existing Phoenician columns in the main room, displaced from the disappeared Temple of Hercules, have been consolidated. All of those material, even the time, build this place.