Dan and Toby met whilst working towards their Master’s of Architecture at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. They developed their award-winning graduating project, Unearthing the Mercado Grande: An Entangled Civic Monastery, across their final year in collaboration with first year MArch student Peter Brewser. Following graduation, Toby has moved to London to work for Foster & Partners, whilst Dan is working in Edinburgh for Studio IMA.

 

The Plaza de Mercado Grande borders the eastern wall of the Spanish city of Ávila. As the traditional location of the weekly market, histories and memories of Ávila were inscribed into its surface, a record now lost beneath a municipal office complex and underground car park designed by Pritzker Prize winner Rafael Moneo - built despite outcry from the local community and international heritage organisations.

 

The Civic Monastery offers redress by unearthing the generous civic potential beneath the Plaza’s surface. A varied programme of public spaces, informed by the typology of the medieval monastery and carefully entangled in the concrete skeleton of Moneo’s edifice, invite the city’s voices back into the Mercado Grande through the housing of a new cast of citizens, organisers and craftspeople.

 

The project developed from an interest in folding fragments of key urban monuments into the wider fabric of the city, and celebrating the interplay of narratives and architectural forms that this invites. The entangled programme of the civic monastery results from a close working relationship developed between the co-authors of the project, celebrating the collective potential of designing together.