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Zahara de la Sierra is a small village in the south of Spain. It is situated on the top of a hill like a dense liquid flowing down along the slope. At its bottom, a concrete dam forms a reservoir.

The town council plans to establish a recreation area embedded in a lower hill site which is next to the water reservoir.

The landscape is shaped by small white pieces of housing based on the small size of the plots. The aerial view of this landscape is defined by the green and white pixels of the properties in this area.

This building for storing canoes is built as another white point in the landscape.


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Three lines define the project's exact situation in the site:
The narrow road going from the secondary one to the water level, the overhead power line crossing the upper part of the site, and the reservoir's flood water level (after heavy rainfall, the rivers can grow quickly, and when this rain arrives at the reservoir, it can create waves making the water level grow up to this maximum flood level).

These conditions, along with others, like the bad ground for foundations, decide what the building becomes.

With these conditions, it was difficult to design something based on a perpendicular geometry, a regular volume. So it started to deform, it became a deformed geometry volume that sums up the answers to the conditions that the site imposed.


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Furthermore, the building is a BY-PASS connecting the parking lot, at the beginning of the secondary road, with the jetty, at water level, so the proposal designs a path between these two points. People get in through the guest entry in their everyday clothes, and leave through the opposite exit with the canoe and sports clothes on their way to the water in the reservoir. In this sense, the building becomes an INTERCHANGER, as a stop, a halt in the path.


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For the construction of this element, we used the prevalent materials of this area; white color as the main ingredient and inclined black tiled roof with some white disseminated skylights. These characteristics give the building a certain landscape character. It could be called a BUILDING-LANDSCAPE, a CANOES LANDSCAPE.

In this way, the building emerges as another white element in the spirit of this region's native landscape.

We developed the program with only one floor; the main one is a big space for storing the canoes, and additional service spaces grouped in small red booths housing showers, toilets and changing rooms.


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Site plan

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Context plan

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Floor plan

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Roof plan

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Longitudinal section

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Julio Barreno Arquitecto are Julio Barreno Gutiérrez, Architect and Rocío Román Aguilar, Technical Engineer.


Creative Commons License


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License .
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