Outdoor Pavilions.

Creator: Pau Bajet, Maria Giramé y Manuel Julià.

Location: Alcanar (Tarragona-Spain).

Photography: Joan Guillamat.

The construction of a new rammed-earth pavilion became an opportunity to transform a former backyard in a campsite and embrace—together with two renewed buildings—a new Mediterranean garden. Thus, the project consists of three pavilions around a patio. A garden inhabited by local plant communities, aromatic bushes with low water demand, that appears as a quiet threshold to access service spaces. Against usual demolition and tabula rasa, the project recognizes material and cultural values of two aged constructions, turns them upside-down and celebrates their prosaic construction typologies and finishes.

Open-air enjoyment and care:

The new pavilion is conceived as a small infrastructural bay that accommodates and dignifies everyday activities of the campsite inhabitants: washing clothes and dishes, cleaning fish, personal and pet hygiene, washing vehicles, etc. These spaces open up to exterior gardens, sheltered porches and pergolas for climbing plants, turning caring tasks into playful and pleasant activities. These bays define generous adaptable rooms, occupied by freestanding furniture—standing on light stainless-steel legs—that endow each area with specific purposes.

Mineral support: rammed-earth blockwork:

The new pavilion is built through mineral tectonics; a kind of vernacular construction that, however, has been carried out through industrialized systems. Its load-bearing walls are constructed with prefab rammed-earth blockwork, of a specific horizontal format and carefully bonded together—expressing an intensified loose pattern in the latticework. The wall close up revels its tectonic logic, while seen in the distance the monolithic gravitas is enhanced.

A tapestry of Sènia scraps:

A tapestry of pavements and paths encircle the garden. They are built with stone from a quarry just 10 km away—Sènia stone—used in all of its possible forms, minimizing waste: cut slabs to define small carpets, insert scraps embedded in a pattern floor, gravel for drainage surface and exposed aggregates in water-blasted concrete of pavements, columns and lintels.

Plain thermodynamics:

Without added complications, this mineral construction, characterized by great thermal inertia and transpiring walls—not only because of its lattices, but also because of its material consistency—ensures climatic comfort during the warm summer days. An atmospheric quality, similarly reinforced by the opening towards gardened thresholds, making the most of evapotranspiration and environmental humidity.

Long-term transformation of Serramar: This project is one of the interventions we are carrying out in the holiday ensemble of Serramar in Alcanar. We have spent the past five years developing together with clients, local authorities, agents and collaborators a long term, slow and rooted plan for the transformation of the place, that started to be implemented in Tennis Serramar (2020), continued with the Outdoor Pavilions (2021), and goes on with broader phases, some of them today under construction, that will be implemented in the following years.