María and Juanjo are Architects, graduated from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Sevilla (ETSA Sevilla) of the University of Seville in 2000. They were tenth and third in their class (of a total of 348) and were awarded the highest grade in their Final Degree Projects, which also received both prizes in the 13th edition of the Dragados Final Project awards. After a one-year scholarship at L´École d´Architecture de Paris-la Seine in France, in 2001 they worked for the Spanish architect Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra. Following this experience they established their own office en 2003, Sol89, a practice in which they strive to accommodate research, teaching and professional practice.

Over the years, Sol89 has had the chance to carry out and build projects from which to approach the intermediate spaces of the city as well as the reuse obsolete structures. This work has been widely published in specialized national and international magazines and journals. The practice has received prizes in competitions and national and international awards for its built work, the most recent being the Silver Medal of the Fassa Bortolo Prize (Ferrara, Italy, 2103), the Weiner Berger First Prize in urban infill category (Vienna, Austria, 2014), the Grand Prix Philippe Rottier of European Architecture (Brussels, Belgium, 2014), Silver Medal of the Fritz-Höger Preis (Berlin, Germany, 2014) and have been finalist in the current editions of the Spanish Biennale of Architecture and Urban Planning (Madrid, 2013). They have been invited to lecture about their work and participate in design workshops in various Architecture Institutes and in most of Spain’s architecture schools.

They are the coauthors of the book Cuaderno Rojo (University of Seville, 2010), and authors of Proyectos Encontrados (Recolectores Urbanos, 2012) as well as El dibujo del mundo (Lampreave, 2014). In this order, these books are reflections about research in architecture design, the debris of contemporary architectural culture and the idea of journey and drawing in the work of architecture.

María González - Juanjo López de la Cruz

The project interprets the self-built original blocks of the neighbourhood where it is located as if they were a single constructive fact. We discover in this kind of constructions a labyrinth of unexpected and surprising spaces that have been adhering to one another in a hazardous way over time. In this way, the Training Centre offers diversity of spaces, where the programme develops facing each other, joined by a continuous path. Diagonal views, places that involve other places, dilute the relationship between the interior and the exterior arising situations of spatial density.