“El Croquis” is a prestigious worldwide known architectural magazine. We went to their famous building located in El Escorial (Madrid) and, as an academic competition (with the possibility to carrying out the winning project although at the end it didn’t happen), they commissioned us to design in teams an “outdoors” bookstore since they wanted to get closer to a kind of public that might not know about them and their job as an architect or designer might do and expand their business. They wanted to start there, in El Escorial, and had already chosen as their first location “La Plaza de la Constitución”.

Our team, composed of Paola Flores, Jessenia Jaén, Johanna Juiña, Katy Peña, Cristina Sánchez de Pazos and myself, won the competition with our project, Sunder.

Our design was based on a book itself. We wanted to play with simple geometries and shapes and light movable structures that could easily be placed as the user pleased at each moment with the help of wheels, either because of light or to not interrupt events held at the plaza, since this was a spot were many events are ususally held in El Escorial.

We carried out an in depth site analysys, and studied the location: it’s views, the urban furnitrue already existing within the plaza, the activity and how many people passed by in average, as well as the climate, sun movement, lighting and the plaza inclination.
We also made a model to work with and have a better idea of scale and space.
With this previous analysys we chose where in the plaza the project could take the most out of the location and proceeded to start thinking about the desing.