OJALÁ / Andrés Jaque

Architects: Andrés Jaque
Location: Calle de San Andrés, 1, 28004 Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Design, Coordination: Sebastian Bech-Ravn, Ljubo Dragomirov, Roberto González García, Senne Meesters, William Mondejar, Jorge Noguera Facuseh, Silvia Rueda Cuellar, Jarča Slamova
Project Year: 2014
Photographs: Miguel de Guzmán

Technical Architect: Juan Pablo Prieto
Graphic Design: Jorge López Conde
Artistic Intervention Program Curator: Roberto González García
Artist: Dourone, José Ja Ja Ja, Eva Solano

From the architect. Ojalá is the architectural response to the social diversity of Malasaña. A diversity that manifests itself in everyday life as an accumulation of different ways to talk, meet, eat and drink.

The project provides an answer to this diversity through a design strategy: assembling a series of spaces in which architecture promotes different relationships with the weather, the furniture, the position with respect to others and the appearance and access to food and drink. A greenhouse, open to the street. A large table shared by clients and servers. Some steps that encourage informal conversation with strangers. And an artificial beach for the staging of a hedonistic day to day.

The bathroom (gender neutral) is an equally important space. A bathroom-tribute to the Smile Sessions of the Beach Boys, which provide access to a space that freezes the moment the beach guys became dark. As a claim of the involvement of the Malasaña bathroom with the night, and its potential for the reinvention of the collective.

Everything has been built with suppliers from the same neighborhood, in a process of experimentation, which has allowed us to develop a contemporary version of 15 mm thick terrazzo in situ, a greenhouse structure from 1 mm thick sheet metal, and wooden crosses in the space, articulated with 3 mm rods.