Converging Landscapes. Marta Maíz

Activity

The architect's desk 8

Library

General public, Professionals

22 March 2022

Architect from the Higher Technical School of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Madrid and Master's in Urban Planning from Francisco de Vitoria University in Madrid. In 1984 she founded her studio together with Enrique Herrada, with whom she continues to work as a team today, under the firm Maíz + Herrada architects.

Although her projects range from complete urban developments to private homes, since 1990 her most important activity has been focused on collective residential projects.

Her work has been recognized by various awards and distinctions from different public administrations and professional associations. Her work stands out for typological innovation in housing, based on a renewed character of internal communal spaces, articulating her residential complexes as a coherent extension of the urban environment in which they are located. Among these distinctions, the National Housing Quality Award 2005, granted by the Ministry of Housing, stands out.

In parallel with her professional activity, she has always combined her teaching activity at the Polytechnic University of Madrid from 1983 to recently, mainly at the Higher Technical School of Architecture, within the Department of Architectural Graphic Ideation. Coordination: Santiago Varela

Collaborates: Architects Association Alicante

Furthermore, since 2014, she has founded and directed AP Gallery, a gallery located in the rural surroundings of the Sierra de Ayllón, in Segovia, oriented towards the latent relationship between Art and Landscape, hosting all kinds of manifestations and formats from performance and music to painting and sculpture, including photography, poetry, and video art.

In sum, these are different manifestations of a multifaceted trajectory that combines a special interest and constant curiosity for the practice of architecture, as a professional achievement that she applies from a personal laboratory where research and learning, teaching, craft, and a transversal and interdisciplinary openness to the environment are integrated, through Art, Landscape, and Architecture.

Her work is founded on a poetic commitment to consider each home as a House, even if it is still pending to be appropriated and inhabited, understanding by House that human space of life and coexistence, always a refuge, curative and healing, to which to return.

Similarly, at a collective level, and as a positioning of social and environmental sustainability in her projects, the creation of each residential complex is considered as a landscape transformation for the creation of an integrated physical and social realm. This must result in a place of rootedness, which enables the condition of neighborliness and belonging to a place.

With numerous realizations at the national level, especially in the field of private development, to which she mostly gains access through competitions, she is currently developing several projects in Alicante, among which the Azara residential complex, in Playa de San Juan, completed during 2021, stands out.

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Information

Opening hours: 7:00 PM
Duration: 90 minutes
Type of activity: Design and Architecture
Modality: At the museum

Related activities

Program to which it belongs

The architecture table

General public ... , 29.01.2015 - 17.12.2026

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Alicante whose collections are formed by works created fundamentally in the twentieth century. They range from the so-called avant-gardes to all the approaches and artistic manifestations that took place in the decades of the second half of the past century. They are expressed on different supports and materials, with diverse dimensions and techniques. In turn, the temporary exhibitions are related to these collections and allow for expanding or deepening some aspects of contemporary chronology. However, contemporary architecture is absent from both the permanent collections and those temporary manifestations.The architecture of the MACA itself, a project created and directed by the Sancho Madridejos Studio, is a beautiful building of great functional efficiency. The syncopated projection of horizontal and vertical spaces establishes a formal order based on the geometry and texture of the materials used in construction, while revealing a kind of tension resolved by the overhead passage of light, a kind of "felt" spirituality more emotional than real.The MACA proposes in a conversational format, meetings around art and architecture around the architect's table. In the MACA Library, the last Thursdays of each month, from January to May 2015.This first cycle will consist of different manifestations. The first and fundamental one will show works by an architect related through his vital and professional activity to the province of Alicante. The selection criterion will be conditioned by the modernity of the proposals, understanding that modernity, first of all, in a chronological sense, attending to those architectures and architects who were protagonists and participants in the advent of contemporaneity. The exhibition of some models will allow for offering three-dimensional models, reclaiming the model as such, as the authors of the Renaissance defended. And to illustrate the complete work process, sketches and preliminary drawings will be shown alongside the project plans and notes developed during the construction process. All of this with the ultimate aim of understanding and grasping in some way the constructed space.The architect's table, a table from 1912, real and present (deposited in the MACA by its owner Alfonso Navarro Guzmán), serves as an ideological foundation to link the exhibitions and will serve as the material support for the models so that we can traverse, while dreaming, the imagined space.

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